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NERVOUS  AND  MENTAL  DISEASE  MONOGRAPH  SERIES  No.  34 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE 

DRAMA 


BY 
SMITH   ELY  JELLIFFE,  M.D. 

AND 

LOUISE  BRINK,  A.B. 

OF  NEW  YORK 


NERVOUS   AND   MENTAL   DISEASE 
PUBLISHING   COMPANY 

NEW   YORK   AND   WASHINGTON 
1922 


NERVOUS  AND  MENTAL  DISEASE 
MONOGRAPH  SERIES 

,         Edited  by 

Drs.  SMITH  ELY  JELLIFFE  and  WM.  A.  WHITE 
Numbers  Issued 

x.  Outlines  of  Psychiatry.     (8th  Edition.)     $4.00.    By  Dr.  William  A.  White. 

2.  Studies  in  Paranoia.     (Out  of  Print.)    By  Drs.  N.  Gierlich  and  M.  Friedman. 

3.  The  Psychology  of  Dementia  Praecox.     (Out  of  Print.)     By  Dr.  C.  G.  Jung. 

4.  Selected  Papers  on  Hysteria  and  other  Psychoneuroses.     (3d  Edition.)    $3.00. 

Prof.  Sigmund  Freud. 

5.  The  Wassermann  Serum  Diagnosis  in  Psychiatry.    $2.00.    By  Dr.  Felix  Plaut. 

6.  Epidemic  Poliomyelitis.    New  York,   1907.     (Out  of  Print.) 

7.  Three  Contributions  to  Sexual  Theory.     (2d  Edition.)    $2.00.    By  Prof.  Sigmi 

Freud. 

8.  Mental  Mechanisms.     (Out  of  Print.)     By  Dr.  Wm.  A.  White. 

9.  Studies  in  Psychiatry.     (Out  of  Print.)     New  York  Psychiatrical  Society. 

10.  Handbook  of  Mental  Examination  Methods.     (Out  of  Print.)     By  Shepherd  Iv 

Franz. 

11.  The  Theory  of  Schizophrenic  Negativism.    $1.00.    By  Prof essor  E.  Bleuler. 

12.  Cerebellar  Functions.    $3.00.    By  Dr.  Andre-Thomas. 

13.  History  of  Prison  Psychoses.    $1.25.    By  Drs.  P.  Nitsche  and  K.  Wilmanns. 

14.  General  Paresis.    $3.00.    By  Prof.  E.  Kraepelin. 

15.  Dreams  and  Myths.     (Out  of  Print.)     By  Dr.  Karl  Abraham. 

16.  Poliomyelitis.    $3.00.    By  Dr.  I.  Wickmann. 

17.  Freud's  Theories  of  the  Neuroses.     (Out  of  Print.)     By  Dr.  E.  Hitschmann. 

18.  The  Myth  of  the  Birth  of  the  Hero.    $1.00.    By  Dr.  Otto  Rank. 

19.  The  Theory  of  Psychoanalysis.     (Out  of  Print.)     By  Dr.  C.  G.  Jung. 

20.  Vagotonia.    $1.00.    (3d  Edition.)    By  Drs.  Eppinger  and  Hess. 

21.  Wishfulfillment  and  Symbolism  in  Fairy  Tales.    $1.00.    By  Dr.  Ricklin. 

22.  The  Dream  Problem.    (Out  of  Print.).  By  Dr.  A.  E.  Maeder. 

23.  The  Significance  of  Psychoanalysis  for  the  Mental  Sciences.    $1.50.    By  Drs. 

Rank  and  D.  H.  Sachs. 

24.  Organ  Inferiority  and  its  Psychical  Compensation.    $2.00.    By  Dr.  Alfred  Adlet. 

25.  The  History  of  the  Psychoanalytic  Movement.    $1.00.    By  Prof.  S.  Freud. 

26.  Technique  of  Psychoanalysis.     (26  Edition.)    $2.50.    By  Dr.  Smith  Ely  Jelliffe. 

27.  Vegetative  Neurology.    $2.50.    By  Dr.  H.  Higier. 

28.  The  Autonomic  Functions  and  the  Personality.    $2.50.    By  Dr.  Edward  J.  Kemp] 

29.  A  Study  of  the  Mental  Life  of  the  Child.    $2.00.    By  Dr.  H.  Von  Hug-Hellmuth. 

30.  Internal  Secretions  and  the  Nervous  System.    $1.00.    By  Dr.  M.  Laignel  La  vast  i 

31.  Sleep  Walking  and  Moon  Walking.    $2.00.    By  Dr.  J.  Sadger. 

32.  Foundations  of  Psychiatry.    $3.00.    By  Dr.  William  A.  White. 

33.  A  Psychoanalytic  Study  of  Psychoses  and  Endocrinoses.    By  Dudley  W.  Fay,  Ph 

34.  Psychoanalysis  and  the  Drama.    By  Smith  Ely  Jelliffe,  M.D.,  and  Louise  Bri; 

Price  $3.00. 

Copyright,  1922,  by 

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INTRODUCTION 

The  function  of  life  is  to  live  and  to  live  more  abundantly. 
Every  agency  created  by  life  should  be  a  servant  to  this  end.  Lit- 
erature is  not  the  least  of  such  agencies,  providing  as  it  does  inter- 
pretations of  the  hidden  meanings  of  life  and  giving  ever  new 
groupings  of  the  forces  of  life  for  the  carrying  out  of  its  great 
function.  The  drama  as  a  special  form  of  literature  strikingly 
performs  this  double  service.  It  penetrates  with  a  particular  di- 
rectness into  the  meanings  of  life.  It  presents  clearly  objectified 
situations  in  which  the  inner  nature  of  man  finds  a  reaction  which 
his  emotional  need  may  grasp  and  make  its  own.  Man  finds  a 
stimulus  to  a  solution  of  conflicts  which  brings  him  to  a  new 
adjustment  of  his  unconscious  forces. 

This  is  not  a  matter  primarily  for  intellect.  It  has  equally  to 
do  with  the  unconscious  affective  life.  Situations  which  present 
merely  patterns  or  warnings  to  intellect  are  coldly  rejected.  Art 
creates  them  with  a  deeper  relationship,  that  of  sympathetic  identi- 
fication with  subjective  needs.  Thus  the  drama  releases  the  feel- 
ing into  an  intuitive  freedom  with  itself  far  more  profoundly  effec- 
tive than  mere  intellectual  understanding  of  the  dramatized  situ- 
ation. Then  it  enlists  these  released  impulses  in  a  new  synthesis 
for  a  higher  sublimation. 

Intellect  is  not  entirely  excluded,  however,  from  this  psycho- 
therapeutic  service  of  the  drama.  The  release  of  the  forces  and 
their  more  lasting  synthesis  into  fuller  opportunities  are  best  at- 
tained when  intellect  obtains  a  wider  view  of  the  factors  involved, 
of  the  difficulties  which  multiply  themselves  about  the  active  life 
forces,  the  conflicts  into  which  they  fall.  It  has  its  place  in  the 
synthesis  emotionally  effected  as  guide  to  the  ends  which  really 
promote  the  great  function  of  life. 

Psychoanalysis  seeks  to  enlarge  the  extent  of  intellectual  knowl- 
edge and  control  of  the  unconscious  mental  life.  It  therefore 
welcomes  the  drama  as  an  important  means  toward  this  end.  It 

iii 


IV  INTRODUCTION 

delights  to  cooperate  with  its  more  intuitively  effected  service  by 
searching  into  the  revelations  of  the  drama,  into  the  means  by 
which  it  accomplishes  its  psychotherapeutic  results.  It  attempts  to 
bring  these  functioning  elements  of  the  drama  more  clearly  into 
the  field  of  intellect  in  order  to  render  more  definite  and  durable 
the  emotional  effect. 

The  studies  here  presented  are  examinations  of  a  few  of  the 
dramas  presented  upon  our  stage  in  recent  years.  They  are  not 
complete  analyses  of  the  plays.  They  are  suggestions  rather  along 
the  line  of  the  fuller  service  which  the  drama  itself  accomplishes. 
They  seek  to  put  into  the  more  precise  form  of  conscious  statement 
the  conflicts,  the  defeats,  the  solutions  which  constitute  the  uncon- 
scious material  out  of  which  dramas  are  woven.  It  is  hoped  that 
they  will  serve  both  to  make  these  human  problems  clearer  and  to 
stimulate  interest  in  the  drama  as  a  representation  and  substitute 
solution  of  such  problems. 

These  studies  were  published  from  time  to  time  in  separate  form. 
This  separate  publication  made  necessary  a  certain  amount  of 
explanation  with  each  paper.  This  produces  a  certain  amount  of 
repetition  when  the  papers  now  appear  together.  It  has  seemed 
advisable  nevertheless  to  permit  them  to  stand  in  their  original 
form.  It  is  hoped  that  the  repetition  will  not  detract  from  the 
interest  in  the  group  as  a  whole,  while  it  will  make  of  each  chapter 
a  distinct  study  to  be  consulted  if  need  be  by  itself. 

The  authors  would  express  appreciation  for  cooperation  on  the 
part  of  dramatist  or  producer  in  making  available  manuscripts  of 
the  plays  and  for  other  courtesies  shown. 

SMITH  ELY  JELLIFFE, 
LOUISE  BRINK 
NEW  YORK,  April,  1922 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION iii 

CHAPTER         I.     The  Drama  and  Psychotherapy I 

CHAPTER       II.     "  Magic,"  and  the  Unconscious 12 

CHAPTER      III.     Visions  of  the  Future.    "  Eyes  of  Youth "    25 
CHAPTER      IV.     Phantasy  Compensation  through  Dreams: 

Peter  Ibbetson 44 

CHAPTER        V.     Alcoholism  and  the  Phantasy  Life.     Tol- 
stoi's Redemption 59 

CHAPTER      VI.     The    Meeting   of    Extremes.     The   Army 

with  Banners 78 

CHAPTER    VII.     Compulsion   and    Freedom.     The    Willow 

Tree 94 

CHAPTER  VIII.     The   Natural    Path  of   Sublimation.    The 

Yellow  Jacket 112 

CHAPTER      IX.     The    Healing    Function    of    the    Dream. 

Dear  Brutus 130 

CHAPTER        X.     The  Jest:    The  Destruction  Wrought  by 

Hate 150 


CHAPTER    I 
THE  DRAMA  AND  PSYCHOTHERAPY  1 

The  drama  has  always  been  an  important  handmaid  of  culture, 
and  in  every  age  of  human  history  its  development  has  kept 
pace  with  that  of  culture.  Its  direct  appeal  to  the  senses,  as 
well  as  its  growing  intellectual  and  artistic  value,  have  made  it 
always  a  leader  of  the  thought  of  the  race  and  of  its  form  of 
expression.  It  has  stimulated  the  people,  educated  them,  directed 
their  religious  aspirations,  and  has  served  for  their  amusement 
and  recreation.  So  well  has  it  done  the  latter  that  the  danger 
has  increased  of  forgetting  that  these  in  themselves  are  con- 
ventional terms  for  something  deeper  and  more  significant.  This 
is  something  that  lies  in  the  mental  life  below  the  surface  and 
gives  to  the  drama  in  its  very  function  of  amusement  and 
recreation  a  far  more  serious  purpose  for  which  it  intrinsically 
stands. 

The  drama,  through  its  artistic  setting  as  well  as  through  its 
emotional  character,  its  closeness  to  the  actual  events  of  life  and 
to  the  impulses  which  move  beneath  these,  is  particularly  fitted 
to  serve  humanity,  whether  it  appears  in  its  serious  or  its  lighter 
moods.  It  stands  in  all  times  and  no  less  in  these  later  more 
sophisticated  times  for  a  safe  and  ready  avenue  of  release  of 
otherwise  overcharged  emotions,  the  outlet  for  which  is  neg- 
lected or  too  severely  restrained. 

It  also  permits  a  constructive  representation  of  these  emotions. 
It  may  be  called  instructive  because  life  cannot  proceed  healthily 
and  effectively  without  becoming  once  more  better  acquainted 
with  the  sum  of  emotions  which  are  too  well  concealed  in  their 
real  nature  from  the  busy  life  in  which  intellect  and  reason 
tend  to  confine  themselves.  The  drama  presents  therefore  a 

*  Printed  in  the  Medical  Record,  Aug.  26,  1916,  under  the  title  The 
Physician  and  Psychotherapy. 

I 


2  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

most  needful,  practical  lesson.  Such  emotions  are  only  repressed, 
they  are  not  annihilated,  nor  are  they  given  sufficient  outlet  in 
useful  work  in  our  hurried  and  strained  activities.  Conversely 
also  our  attempts  at  work  remain  hurried  and  strained  because  of 
the  partly  conscious  suppression  and  the  more  largely  unconscious 
repression  of  all  these  emotions.  The  hours  at  the  theater  should 
therefore  greatly  relieve  the  strain  of  repression  and  they  should 
moreover  furnish  food  for  further  thoughtful  speculation  and 
awaken  the  sense  of  recognition  of  these  inner  vital  factors. 
Through  such  hours  there  is  possible  better  acquaintance  with 
the  vast  emotional  life  which  lies  beneath  the  far  narrower  ra- 
tional life  and  is  therefore  largely  master  of  it.  Wiser,  calmer 
and  more  effective  use  and  control  of  this  underlying  dynamic 
life  and  its  impulses  for  the  purposes  and  ends  of  reason  and 
intellect  result  from  becoming  conversant  with  this  emotional 
or  affective  life  and  its  conflicts,  its  striving  for  expression,  the 
successes  or  the  disasters  which  may  result  and  the  methods  by 
which  all  this  activity  takes  place. 

The  cultural  value  of  the  drama  has  been  acknowledged  in 
the  past  in  various  well  defined  ways.  It  also  receives  fresh 
acknowledgment  in  the  aspirations  today  of  educational  and 
other  cultural  spheres.  Beneath  all  this  however  is  a  still  broader 
and  deeper  meaning  in  the  drama  and  also  in  kindred  forms  of 
expression.  This  may  be  defined  as  a  psychologically  applicable 
value,  one  which  deals  directly  with  the  emotion  which  constitutes 
the  greater  part  of  the  life  of  man,  and  through  this  with  man's 
interests  and  activities  in  every  sphere  in  their  most  fundamental 
and  vital  significance.  The  drama  and  other  such  forms  of  art 
reach  the  dynamic  force,  the  energy,  the  expression  and  activity 
of  which  makes  individual  character,  and  thus  they  aid  in  its 
understanding  and  better  building  and  control.  Psychological 
approach  to  the  drama  is  that  which  seeks  to  reach,  through  the 
drama's  special  artistic  pathway,  into  the  energic  nature  of  man- 
kind and  draw  therefrom  better  understanding  of  human  life  in 
its  individual  and  social  needs  and  activities,  in  order  to  aid  in 
the  attainment  of  better  use  of  the  inner  force  of  life  for  these 
individual  and  social  ends. 


THE  DRAMA  AND  PSYCHOTHERAPY  3 

The  effort  to  understand  the  drama  from  such  a  point  of  view 
and  the  inner  meaning  thus  discovered  ought  to  be  of  interest 
to  those  who  especially  minister  to  the  psychical  needs  of  the 
individual  and  society  and  are  conscious  of  the  problematic  char- 
acter of  such  needs.  Perhaps  the  physician  feels  most  keenly 
the  need  of  some  such  aid  in  grasping  inner  problems.  At  any 
rate  he  would  first  acknowledge  the  value  of  any  investigation 
into  the  psychic  factors  represented  in  the  drama  or  other  work 
of  art,  which  throws  clearness  into  the  obscurity  and  maze  of 
mental  disturbances. 

Psychology  and  medicine  are  coming  more  and  more  to  rec- 
ognize that  mental  disturbance  is  a  thing  of  degree  and  not 
of  kind  in  its  separation  from  so-called  normality,  and  that  the 
term  disturbance  may  be  applied  relatively  to  the  varying  man- 
ifestations known  as  poor  adjustment,  discontentment,  ill  success, 
unhappiness,  "  nervousness  "  in  short,  to  the  mental  attitude  and 
mental  expression  of  all  members  of  society  at  any  place  and 
time  as  well  as  to  the  states  of  those  who  are  markedly  ill.  If 
this  is  a  correct  viewpoint,  then  the  study  of  these  disturbances 
of  varying  degrees  is  one  and  the  same  and  the  representation 
of  mental  problems  in  art  should  be  found  to  stand  in  the  service 
of  the  whole  of  society. 

The  privilege  of  the  drama  is  to  represent  in  lighter  or  more 
serious  form  the  mental  activities  always  at  work  forming  the 
little  peculiarities  of  life  or  its  greater  disturbances,  its  smaller 
triumphs  and  its  more  distinguished  successes.  The  tragedies  of 
the  drama  are  those  of  actual  life,  and  the  somber  real  tragedies 
of  mental  disease  may  be  given  through  the  drama  no  less  ac- 
tuality or  profundity  of  meaning  because  represented  and 
softened  by  the  touch  of  an  imaginative  setting  and  an  artistic 
treatment.  The  very  phantasy  form  in  which  such  are  presented 
is  the  product  of  this  same  mental  life  and  its  content,  its  mech- 
anism, its  wide  and  deep,  place  in  human  psychical  life  are  brought 
more  distinctly  to  light.  A  study  like  this  therefore  offers  itself 
to  all  who  would  understand  more  fully  their  own  mental  life 
or  that  of  others  through  a  medium  which  clothes  itself  in  a 
form  which  gives  recreation  and  pleasure  and  delight.  It  is 


4  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

desired  that  the  consideration  of  these  works  of  art  from  this 
point  of  view  should  more  especially  arouse  the  physician  to  a 
fuller  realization  of  his  responsibility  toward  the  mental  life 
of  his  patients  as  he  meets  them  day  by  day  with  their  minor 
or  their  major  psychic  difficulties.  'It  would  rouse  him  especially 
to  an  appreciation  of  the  aid  of  the  drama  and  kindred  works 
of  art  not  only  in  clarifying  his  understanding  of  the  mental  life, 
but  also  to  a  recognition  of  these  artistic  products  as  direct  aids  to 
the  patient  or  others  whose  psychic  burdens  he  must  help  to  bear. 

The  appeal  is  the  more  urgent  because  of  the  long-accustomed 
ignorance  or  lack  of  recognition  of  the  working  within  the  human 
being  of  the  dynamic  force  which  makes  life  a  thing  of  vitality 
and  success  and  from  which  also  its  disturbances  necessarily 
arise.  All  too  familiar  is  the  complaint  from  sufferers  or  from 
those  who  have  the  welfare  of  such  at  heart,  the  complaint  on 
every  hand  and  the  alarm  of  "  tired  nerves,"  increase  of  "  nerv- 
ousness," mental  strain  and  mental  breakdown,  but  these  are 
only  names  which  vainly  seek  to  express  the  demand  for  output 
of  the  energy  within.  The  terms  are  misnomers  which  seek 
to  deny  the  energy,  serving  to  call  for  rest  when  in  reality  ac- 
tivity and  freer  expression  is  what  the  race  needs.  Psycho- 
therapy, honestly  and  fearlessly  searching  into  the  disturbances 
which  come  for  healing  and  finding  the  conflicts  which  under- 
lie these,  discovers  the  abundance  of  unused  or  badly  applied 
energy,  which  is  merely,  and  often  in  vain,  awaiting  discovery 
and  conviction  on  the  part  of  the  individual  that  its  very  es- 
sential right  is  the  activity  which  has  seemed  denied  it.  The 
psychotherapist  comes  to  realize  that  the  pressing  need  is  an 
understanding  of  this  and  a  re-education  in  the  value  of  the 
individual's  own  mental  life  and  a  redirection  of  its  elements 
into  such  paths  of  well  directed  utilization.  And  he  finds  con- 
vincingly that  the  revelations  of  the  drama  tend  toward  these 
ends. 

To  such  a  physician,  who  seeks  to  understand,  come  letters 
like  this  from  those  who  are  in  need  or  see  others  in  need: 


THE  DRAMA  AND  PSYCHOTHERAPY 


Dr.  X : 

Dear  Sir— The  fact  that  you  are  one  of  the  translators  of has  led 

me  to  address  this  letter  to  you. 

My  husband  suffered  a  complete  nervous  collapse  in  July,  1909.  He  was 
pronounced  a  victim  of  neurasthenia  by  local  physicians,  which  opinion 

was  confirmed  later  by  Dr.  Y of  B Hospital.    The  patient 

took  medicine  under  direction  of  Dr.  Y for  two  years.    Rest  and 

change  of  scene  have  greatly  improved  but  have  failed  to  cure.  He  is 
possessed  by  worry,  indecision,  nervousness,  etc.  I  desire  to  find  a  phy- 
sician who  uses  psychoanalysis  in  the  treatment  of  nerves.  Our  local  phy- 
sicians seem  either  afraid  or  ignorant  of  that  method,  and  I  have  failed 
utterly  in  gaining  any  help  in  looking  up  the  proper  person  to  consult. 
My  means  are  limited,  but  nevertheless  I  am  prepared  to  make  great  sacri- 
fices for  sake  of  treatment. 

Will  you  recommend  someone  that  uses  this  treatment?  Our  need  is 
very  great,  and  that  is  my  only  excuse  for  asking  this  favor  from  a 
stranger. 

Thanking  you  in  advance  for  the  courtesy  of  a  reply,  I  am, 

Yours  truly, 

Mrs.  A. 

The  people  are  waiting  for  help  but  are  ignorant  where  to 
turn  and  just  what  it  is  that  will  help  them.  Nor  does  the 
physician,  however  truly  desirous  to  render  aid,  recognize  that 
the  help  lies  within  the  patient  or  the  needy  individual  himself. 
Both  fail  to  realize  the  vital  source  and  character  of  the  diffi- 
culty and  the  fact  that  both  it  and  its  remedy  exist  in  the  very 
mental  capacity  and  vigor  which  make  up  human  life  and  all 
its  possibilities.  Definite  analysis  and  investigation  into  this,  as 
it  lies  by  far  mostly  below  the  surface  of  ordinarily  evident 
things,  is  just  becoming  an  accepted  fact.  And  here  we  do 
well  to  invoke  the  rich  service  of  the  drama  in  awaking  interest 
in  this  deep  underlying  emotional  territory,  where  our  mentality 
is  founded,  and  in  revealing  its  hidden  meanings  and  the  yearn- 
ing and  strivings  which  arise  out  of  these,  for  moreover  igno- 
rance and  lack  of  control  of  these  is  the  cause  of  psychic  dis- 
turbance. 

The  hardened  heart  of  ignorance  can  ill  dispense  with  the 
warmer  arousing  which  comes  through  the  dramatized  appeal 
of  human  factors  and  of  these  deepest  needs  which  lie  within 
the  human  life.  Long  ago  a  dramatic  prophet  cried  aloud  amid 


6  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

the  natural  amphitheatres  of  Judaea.  "  Is  there  no  balm  in 
Gilead?  Why,  then,  is  not  the  health  of  the  daughter  of  my 
people  recovered  ?  " 

The  culture  wrested  from  the  centuries  which  have  intervened 
since  this  cry  went  up,  from  the  ancient  prophet  of  mankind 
has  brought  us  much  of  advantage.  Science  has  put  into  our 
hands  countless  tools  by  which  we  can  further  comfort  and 
health.  We  should  be  masters  of  the  art  and  practice  of  com- 
plete health.  And  still  the  cry  is  heard.  "  The  wise  men  are 
ashamed,  they  are  dismayed  and  taken.  .  .  .  They  have  healed 
the  hurt  of  the  daughter  of  my  people  slightly,  saying,  Peace, 
peace;  when  there  is  no  peace." 

It  is  not  a  mere  appeal  of  sentimentality  to  bring  back  this 
ancient  outcry  against  the  failure  of  those  in  high  places  to 
minister  to  the  profoundest  human  needs.  Our  physicians  oc- 
cupy today  this  exalted  station,  and  still  an  incessant  and  in- 
creasing call  for  help  falls  vainly  upon  our  ears.  It  is  not 
desire  and  purpose  to  help  that  are  wanting.  It  is,  nevertheless, 
lack  of  sympathy  in  the  truest  sense  of  the  word,  sympathy 
which  is  understanding.  The  physician  has  compassion  in  that 
the  sufferings  are  too  often  likewise  his  own,  but  the  deeper 
understanding  which  could  bring  relief  is  somehow  not  his. 
Perhaps  a  little  research  will  reveal  some  of  the  causes  for  this 
darkening  of  our  understanding,  and  therefore  our  failure  just 
where  the  need  is  most  pressing. 

What  is  the  reality  of  this  human  cry  in  its  modern  form? 
No  prophet  stands  upon  the  mountain  top  to  voice  the  burden 
of  a  suffering  people.  The  complaint,  however,  is  no  less  in- 
sistent. Its  force  is  the  noiseless  current,  often,  of  the  mind 
weighted  by  its  own  inner  conflict  or  of  the  helpless  witness 
of  such  an  outspoken  conflict  in  a  cherished  relative  or  friend. 

Here  in  this  letter  a  wife  writes  for  advice  in  choosing  medical 
assistance  for  her  husband.  He  has  been  a  nervous  wreck  for 
a  number  of  years.  He  has  seen  twenty  doctors  and  more. 
Medicine  was  prescribed  for  him  for  two  years,  the  result  of 
which  the  letter  does  not  mention.  It  however  goes  on  to  say 
that  "  rest,  change  of  scene  have  greatly  improved  but  have 


failed  to  cure.  He  is  possessed  by  the  worry,  indecision,  etc., 
of  nervousness."  The  same  familiar  story.  The  profound  bur- 
den of  these  words  falls  only  upon  those  who  have  borne  it 
themselves,  or  upon  those  whose  vision  has  been  directed  by 
psychical  aid  and  clarified  by  the  courage  of  self-analysis  to 
penetrate  beneath  the  surface  of  the  conscious  life  into  the  im- 
measurable territory  of  the  unconscious,  where  the  deeper  life 
of  man  is  hidden,  and  where  the  mighty  racial  forces  which 
have  made  civilization,  and  those  that  would  hinder  it  for  the 
sake  of  primary  individual  freedom,  strive  in  titanic  conflict. 
The  stifled  cry,  checked  by  the  impulses  we  call  pride,  humility, 
self  distrust,  regard  for  our  fellow  men,  reveals  only  in  partial 
glimpses  the  existing  struggle. 

The  letter  here  referred  to  represents  the  condition  of  many. 
The  world  is  full  of  this  sort  of  resigned,  hopeless  struggle, 
or  of  determined  but  futile  efforts  to  rid  oneself  of  such  un- 
social, unproductive  forms  of  behavior,  or  again  of  those  who 
have  found  a  false  refuge  even  more  useless  and  vain  and  piti- 
able. The  entire  strength  of  Christian  Science,  of  New  Thought, 
and  of  the  thousand  and  one  cults,  lies  in  the  fact  that  the  reg- 
ular medical  profession  is  too  busy  with  things  material  to 
interest  itself  in  the  mental  or  spiritual  life  of  the  multitudes. 

Is  it  not  high  time  that  we  awaken  to  the  meaning  of  such 
phenomena?  That  we  look  about  us  to  see  if  there  is  any  way 
by  which  we  can  understand  their  intrinsic,  their  actual  meaning, 
in  order  to  find  and  utilize  the  remedy?  Physicians  have  not 
been  wholly  idle  nor  indifferent.  Yet  ignorance  and  lack  of 
understanding  have  led  to  an  apparent  indifference,  to  a  condition 
of  mental  sloth  fulness  and  moral  cowardice  which  was  expressed 
recently  by  a  physician,  who  said,  half  humorously,  wholly  seri- 
ously :  "  Oh,  I  never  have  anything  to  do  with  neurotics.  I 
send  them  out  at  once."  Others  have  manifested  the  helpless- 
ness that  paralyzes  even  sincere  effort  to  relieve  suffering,  and 
have  prescribed  rest,  travel,  amusement,  aimless  occupation,  all 
the  accessories  of  therapy  which  fail  because  they  ignorantly 
condemn  a  patient  to  palliative  measures  which  only  perhaps 
condemn  the  sufferer  to  a  little  further  attempt  to  repress  an 


8  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

irrepressible  conflict,  while  in  reality  the  secret  struggle  accom- 
panies him  on  his  journeys,  thrusts  itself  upon  all  his  occu- 
pation, stalks  like  an  unwelcome,  ghostly  guest  at  every  festive 
scene,  making  a  mockery  of  the  measures  prescribed  by  the 
physician  or  urged  by  solicitous  friends.  Too  often,  also,  enor- 
mous expense  is  incurred  and  prolonged  in  the  fruitless  efforts 
of  escape,  and  the  very  hopelessness  of  cure  is  even  notoriously 
capitalized.  The  intense  reality  of  the  individual  struggle  rec- 
ognizes all  too  clearly  the  ineffectualness  of  such  means.  They 
palliate  the  "  hurt "  and  cover  it  "  slightly, "  but  such  measures 
have  too  long  cried  "  Peace,  peace,  when  there  is  no  peace." 

There  is  one,  and  only  one,  way  to  remedy  this  state  of  affairs. 
That  way  is  to  set  to  work  to  understand  why  men  and  women 
and  children  are  suffering  from  nervous  and  mental  disturbances 
and  the  tremendous  significance  of  these  maladies  in  regard  to 
their  cause  and  as  to  what  must  be  done  about  it.  Or  more 
universally  stated  it  is  high  time  that  all  members  of  society 
awaken  to  an  understanding  of  all  this  inner  individual  force 
of  instinct  and  emotion  which  works  so  disastrously  for  ill  but 
which  might  and  can  create  the  health  and  happiness  of  a  pur- 
poseful life. 

Toward  such  an  understanding,  it  will  be  said,  physicians  have 
labored.  But  they  have  not  succeeded  in  the  unraveling  of  the 
psychoneurosis,  of  which  all  humanity  has  a  trace.  The  school 
of  psychoanalysis  has  tried  to  press  nearer  to  the  essential  facts 
of  the  mental  life.  Freud,  through  careful  experimental  work 
and  with  a  sublime  courage,  discovered  a  method  of  penetrating 
the  deeper  and  vaster  portion  of  a  man's  life  than  that  with  which 
we  are  accustomed  to  reckon,  a  territory  hardly  suspected,  and 
surely  not  understood.  There  lie  all  the  forces  of  the  past  which 
have  made  the  race  and  the  individual,  and  these  forces  are  still 
active,  still  striving  for  mastery  the  one  over  the  other.  The 
recognition  of  this  is  more  revolutionary  than  appears  at  first 
thought.  The  comprehension  of  the  fact  demands  further  pro- 
found consideration  of  the  widely  diverse  character  of  these 
forces  and  their  antagonism  and  incompatibility.  This  necessi- 
tates a  knowledge  and  understanding  of  biological  evolution  and 


THE  DRAMA  AND  PSYCHOTHERAPY  9 

of  anthropology  in  order  to  know  the  instinctive  forces  in  their 
intrinsic  nature  and  the  gradually  advancing  modes  of  expression 
through  spiritualization  or  sublimation  of  the  same.  Only  thus 
can  we  realize  why  they  are  factors  today  in  the  normal  outflow 
of  energy,  or  for  that  blocking  of  energy  which  causes  maladap- 
tation  to  social  requirements  and  the  concealed  internal  struggle, 
which  breaks  forth  to  consciousness  in  the  disguise  of  all  sorts 
of  painful  or  unproductive  symbolic  symptoms. 

The  courageous  investigations  of  Freud  and  his  followers  into 
this  darkened  portion  of  man's  nature  disclosed  this  immeasur- 
able stream  of  energy  or  libido,  a  force  that  cannot  be  abated, 
only  diverted,  dammed,  and  introverted  through  the  inertia  which 
is  a  psychological  feature  of  infantile  and  primitive  feeling,  which 
produces  and  fosters  the  overwhelming  desire  to  return  to  in- 
fantile and  primitive  conditions  and  modes  of  reaction.  And 
these  reality  sternly  forbids.  Hence  the  strong  repression  of 
this  antisocial  attitude  and  those  lawless  individual  tendencies 
which  mark  it;  hence  also  the  failure  of  repression,  the  yielding 
to  the  infantile  pull  which  occasions  the  conflict,  or  the  complete 
yielding  which  shuts  the  individual  away  into  a  thoroughly  un- 
social world  of  his  own. 

All  this,  of  course,  precludes  a  distinction  in  kind  between  the 
mental  life  of  the  sick  and  the  well.  Only  a  difference  of  degree 
of  adjustment  to  reality  and  of  freedom  from  infantile  dominion 
exists.  Therefore  our  acceptance  of  the  theory  demands  an 
acknowledgment  of  inacceptable  impulses  existing  within  each 
one  of  us  in  all  their  primitive  and  infantile  egotistic  force.  It 
demands,  also,  that  we  search  out  and  understand  these  impulses, 
and  see  whether  they  master  us  or  are  our  servants.  They  court 
disguise,  so  that  this  involves  a  thoughtful  psychological  attitude 
and  unwearied  searching  into  all  the  history  of  mankind  in  order 
to  discover  his  modes  of  expression  and  the  means  of  disguise 
universally  employed;  to  discover,  also,  the  mistakes  into  which 
the  infantile  mode  of  thought  and  action  have  led  man  away 
from  the  pathway  of  achievement  and  advance,  as  well  as  his 
victory  over  the  inertia  and  self-seeking,  which  has  brought  the 
race  onward. 


I0  PSYCHOANALYSIS    AND    THE    DRAMA 

All  this  is  necessary  equipment  with  which  to  approach  the 
problem  of  individual  mental  and  nervous  disease.  For  the  in- 
dividual repeats  the  history  of  the  race.  A  knowledge  of  one 
acquaints  us  with  the  real  nature  of  the  other,  and  gives  the 
only  means  of  intelligently  and  effectively  handling  the  complex 
entanglements  into  which  the  fundamental  struggle  of  impulses, 
rendered  keener  and  more  insistent  by  the  increasing  demands 
for  repression  which  follow  advancing  culture,  has  plunged  vast 
numbers  of  our  population.  And  into  all  these  mental  phenomena 
the  drama  takes  its  audiences. 

Such  principles  as  these  stated  have  to  be  borne  in  mind  in 
the  study  of  the  drama  as  they  serve  to  deepen  its  meaning  and 
enhance  its  value  in  its  relation  to  the  deeper  meanings  of  life. 
Whatever  means  may  aid  thought  and  therapy  to  penetrate  the 
unconscious  realm,  the  harboring  place  of  all  the  mysteries  and  ter- 
rors of  mankind,  and  to  recognize  this  unconscious  as  the  heri- 
tage of  every  one,  of  the  physician  as  well  as  the  patient  before 
him,  and  of  all  society,  by  all  means  let  us  use  them.  In  such 
a  light  the  work  of  art  can  never  be  neglected. 

In  order  to  discover  the  psychic  needs  of  mankind  and  to  meet 
them  no  effective  tool  may  be  passed  by  with  indifference  nor 
may  there  be  timorous  shrinking  from  unknown  forces.  Each 
instrument  is  rightly  valued  only  through  its  use  and  in  this 
alone  it  may  be  perfected  where  it  is  incomplete.  One  which 
enters,  as  does  psychoanalysis,  into  the  vitality  of  human  life 
grants  much  to  those  who  employ  it  carefully  and  conscientiously, 
in  increasing  knowledge,  understanding,  genuine  sympathy  and 
one's  own  increasing  self  control  and  effectiveness.  So  the  op- 
portunity for  a  clearer  and  more  profound  knowledge  of  the 
inner  psychic  nature,  such  as  art  and  psychoanalysis  together 
should  afford,  lays  upon  the  physician  or  any  other  social  worker 
and  upon  the  individual  members  of  society  themselves  a  special 
responsibility  for  accepting  and  employing  such  a  combination 
to  reach  the  distraught  mind  in  its  particular  type  of  suffering 
and  incapacity  for  life,  to  restore  such  a  mind  by  patient  un- 
remitting effort.  This  imperfect  attempt  to  arouse  interest  in 
such  an  approach  to  human  problems  offers  itself  in  such  a  spirit 
of  responsibility. 


THE  DRAMA  AND  PSYCHOTHERAPY  II 

It  is  necessarily  a  slow  process  which  deals  with  the  delicate 
intricacies  of  the  human  psyche  and  rouses  it  to  a  new  confidence 
in  itself  in  independence  and  freedom  from  infantile  forces.  It 
makes  every  participant  in  it  in  part  at  least  the  conductor  of 
the  newborn  soul  into  a  freedom  which  is  racially  productive  and 
creative.  Each  needy  individual  himself  also  learns  the  first 
principles  of  independence  as  he  enters  into  the  interest  of  an 
analysis  and  understanding  of  his  psychical  life.  There  is  a 
discovery  of  the  undiminished  energy,  the  immortal  libido  which 
becomes  free  from  its  bonds.  There  is  a  glimpse  or  a  vision 
even  of  the  great  and  satisfying  task  of  directing  this  libido 
into  progressive,  constructive  paths  and  to  setting  it  to  flow  free, 
satisfied  and  in  harmony  with  any  demands  reality  may  make 
upon  it,  because  now  it  pours  outward.  Such  a  psychic  task, 
which  belongs  to  the  special  worker,  or  to  each  individual  him- 
self demands  every  aid  and  counts  the  artistic  an  important  one. 

Knowledge  of  the  inner  psychic  life  opens  up  limitless  pos- 
sibilities and  opportunities  because  it  deals  with  human  life  as  it 
sweeps  back  into  the  past,  as  it  extends  in  breadth  and  intensity 
into  the  future  and  because  it  considers  it  not  merely  as  a  whole 
but  in  relation  to  individual  complexities  and  individual  relation- 
ships and  adjustments  to  the  whole,  and  to  individual  share  in 
the  racial  task.  All  these  things  the  drama  represents,  setting 
forth  these  psychical  elements  and  factors  in  individual  realistic 
situations  where  these  forces  of  life  are  at  work. 


CHAPTER    II 
"  MAGIC  : "  AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS1 

The  spectator  need  not  be  consciously  aware  of  the  close 
relation  to  himself  of  the  problems  presented  in  the  drama. 
His  intense  interest  in  their  progress,  their  solution  or  the  dis- 
aster that  follows  in  their  train  lies  chiefly  in  the  unconscious 
where  his  own  problems  largely  lie  hidden.  The  mission  of  the 
drama  is  to  apply  healing,  sometimes  through  the  solution  ob- 
jectively presented  or  perhaps  only  through  the  laying  of  these 
open  for  a  certain  amount  of  psychic  ventilation.  This  may 
occur  through  a  tragic  exposure  of  the  problems  and  their  results. 
The  existence  of  the  problems  may  even  be  quite  unguessed,  the 
need  of  healing  may  be  the  least  acknowledged  reason  for  seek- 
ing pleasure  in  an  evening's  performance. 

Psychic  problems  would  by  no  means  form  the  conscious  mo- 
tives for  attendance  upon  the  play  produced  under  the  name  of 
"  Magic."  Nevertheless,  the  place  of  the  artistic  psychologist 
might  well  be  claimed  for  the  author.  For  his  hand  reaches 
into  depths  which  ordinarily  pass  unknown  and  there  touches 
matters  no  less  real  and  potent  in  the  psychic  nature  of  every 
man  and  woman  because  unseen.  This  is  no  less  true  because 
he  formulates  them  under  some  other  name  than  that  which  psy- 
choanalysis would  choose.  A  touch  of  revelation  strikes  the  rock, 
to  use  the  author's  own  symbolism,  and  at  least  tiny  streams 
trickle  out  giving  relief  to  pent-up  floods  of  emotion  which 
otherwise,  without  such  grateful  though  unrecognized  forms  of 
relief,  would  fret  and  break  at  last  in  their  fury  beneath  the 
surface  and  cause  disruption  in  many  lives.  For  thus  it  is  too 
often,  since  man  hides  within  himself  a  dynamism  so  little  known 

1  Printed  in  Transactions  of  the  Charaka  Club,  Vol.  IV.  1919,  under 
title  Magic  Above  and  Below.  G.  K.  Chesterton :  Magic.  Brentano,  N.  Y. 

12 


"  MAGIC :       AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS  13 

that  nothing  is  farther  removed  from  his  ordinary  recognized 
thought. 

This  little  play  brings  a  modern  audience,  lighthearted  or  not, 
often  superficially  alert  to  escape  some  of  the  serious  conscious 
burdens  of  the  day,  to  confront  them  after  all  under  the  guise 
of  recreation  and  in  their  unconscious  deeper  aspects.  This  is 
done  in  words  which  are  made  to  return  out  of  the  magic  of 
the  remote  past,  when  the  conscious  thought  of  the  world  was 
less  exact  even  than  it  is  today.  "  A  child,"  the  author  says, 
"  is  someone  you  can  play  with,"  so  he  takes  the  grown  children 
of  the  hour  and  gracefully  reminds  them  of  the  child  alive 
within  each  one,2  which  would  always  play.  He  lays  the  child's 
hand  into  that  of  the  adult  who  then  pinches  at  reality  so  hard 
that  the  phantasms  move  away  — <  and  a  sigh  of  relief  is  heard. 

But  what  is  the  reality?  Which  is  the  child  and  the  child's 
play,  and  where  is  the  adult  left  to  stand?  It  may  be  that  there 
is  not  here  mere  play  but  the  healing  touch  of  adjustment  for 
the  most  real  and  persistent  human  problems,  a  suggestion  of 
the  deeper  complexities  of  these  problems  that  confront  the  hu- 
man race  as  generations  and  individuals  pass  over  the  stage 
of  life. 

Patricia  has  brought  from  Ireland  to  her  adoptive  English 
home  a  belief  in  fairies.  She  is  singing  in  the  wood  on  a  misty 
rainy  evening  when  she  meets  a  fairy  "  in  the  shape  and  size 
of  a  man."  Her  child  faith  is  rudely  torn  asunder  when  this  fairy, 
who  for  a  while  successfully  fills  the  role  and  pleases  her,  dis- 
covers himself  as  the  conjurer  hired  by  her  uncle  the  duke  to 
show  them  some  commonplace  juggling.  The  duke  hopes  in 
this  way  to  compromise  satisfactorily  with  Patricia's  somewhat 
dangerous  mystic  tendencies  for  he  always  believes  in  giving 
equal  credence  to  both  sides  of  a  question,  although  he  may 
arrive  nowhere  by  so  doing.  So  he  thinks  in  this  way  to  satisfy 
both  the  dreamer  Patricia  and  her  most  practical  brother  who 
is  to  arrive  from  America  this  very  evening.  "  Now  the  Duke 

2  "In  our  inmost  souls  we  are  and  remain  children  our  whole  life  long. 
Scratch  the  adult  and  you  will  find  the  child."  S.  Ferenczi:  Introjektion 
und  Ubertragung.  Psa.  Jahrbuch,  Vol.  I,  p.  444. 


j,  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

thinks  a  conjurer  would  just  meet  the  case.  I  suppose  he 
vaguely  thinks  it  would  brighten  things  up,  and  somehow  satisfy 
the  believer's  interest  in  supernatural  things  and  the  unbeliever's 
interest  in  smart  things.  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  unbeliever  thinks 
the  conjurer's  a  fraud,  and  the  believer  thinks  he's  a  fraud,  too. 
The  conjurer  satisfies  nobody.  That  is  why  he  satisfies  the 
Duke." 

The  doctor,  who  is  also  at  hand,  deals  practically  and  calmly 
with  matters  medical  and  social,  and  particularly  applies  him- 
self with  a  special  sympathy  to  the  interests  of  his  friends.  He 
is  an  agnostic  professedly,  whose  constant  practical  service  to 
his  fellow  men  keeps  him  safely  on  the  level  of  reality.  He  is 
so  imbued  with  practical  common  sense  in  the  interests  of  his 
clients'  health  that  he  is  almost  open  to  a  little  more  than  the 
methodical  consideration  of  ailments  and  their  formulistic  treat- 
ment. He  is  so  human  that  he  is  slightly  tolerant  at  least  of 
something  outside  of  the  limit  of  rigid  medical  definitions.  At 
any  rate  he  cannot  dismiss  all  of  Patricia's  faith  by  the  sum- 
mary thou  shalt  not  of  her  brother's  ultrapracticality  and  ultra- 
science.  He  can  "  consider  "  even  that  a  "  family  superstition  " 
might  be  "better  for  the  health  than  a  family  quarrel."  And 
he  walks  over  casually  to  Patricia :  "  Dream  for  us  who  can 
dream  no  longer.  But  do  not  quite  forget  the  difference.  .  .  . 
The  difference  between  the  things  that  are  beautiful  and  the  things 
that  are  there."  The  clergyman  Smith  has  his  own  conviction 
of  the  fixity  of  the  stars  of  which  Patricia  dreams.  He  is  very 
willing  to  admit  there  is  something  of  more  value  beyond  the 
tangible  things  at  hand  and  the  success  such  as  the  brother's  which 
is  built  apparently  on  them  alone.  He  is  not  quite  willing  to 
admit  the  dream  stars  as  floating  freely  about  somehow  de- 
pendent on  the  choice  or  the  chance  of  men.  But  after  all  he 
adheres  to  his  fixed  conceptions  only  as  they  serve  mankind  and 
have  served  him,  as  they  hold  for  him  certain  values  which  the 
worldly  unbelief  of  Morris  the  brother  has  yet  convincingly  to 
supplant.  Morris's  overbearing  rationalism  tries  to  hit  hard  at 
all  beliefs  which  seem  to  take  account  of  anything  more  hidden 
and  mystical  than  the  power  of  hard  cash  which  he  can  handle 


"  MAGIC:  '  AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS  15 

and  see  or  of  the  literal  machinery  by  which  he  can  lift  petrol 
from  the  wells  in  Arizona.  That  there  might  have  been  any 
other  kind  of  apparatus  at  work  in  human  lives  through  the 
ages  than  this  most  material  kind,  he  tries  stoutly  to  deny.  "  I 
don't  believe  in  "  seems  to  establish  for  him  beyond  challenge  the 
limit  against  conceiving  any  truth  at  work  beyond  that  which 
his  eyes  can  see. 

The  clergyman's  larger  faith  is  more  reverent  and  more  pa- 
tient toward  farther  possibilities  of  knowledge  and  of  action. 
He  has  this  advantage  over  Morris's  materialistic  narrowness. 
When  the  latter  impatiently  and  with  patronizing  supercilious- 
ness objects,  "  Well,  well,  they  didn't  know  everything  in  those 
old  times,"  Smith  replies,  "  No,  and  in  those  old  times  they 
knew  they  didn't.  [Dreamily.]  Where  shall  wisdom  be  found, 
and  what  is  the  place  of  understanding  ?  " 

To  this  group  the  conjurer  is  to  exhibit  some  of  his  tricks. 
This  is  the  duke's  indecisive  way  of  meeting  the  puzzling  sit- 
uation of  Patricia's  absorbed  wanderings  in  her  dreams  and 
out  in  the  damp  twilight,  which  the  doctor  fears  is  no  better 
for  her  health  than  the  mystic  tendencies  she  manifests.  It 
proves  to  be  the  conjurer  who  has  played  the  part  of  fairy  to 
Patricia,  making  her  dreams  for  a  brief  time  come  true.  She 
has  caught  him  in  the  woods  or  he  has  caught  her  unawares 
and  with  his  long  cloak  and  peaked  hood,  aided  by  the  shadows, 
has  been  able  to  impersonate  "  the  fairy  as  he  truly  is ...  his 
head  above  all  the  stars  and  his  feet  amid  the  floors  of  the  sea. 
Old  women,"  he  continues  to  Patricia,  "  have  taught  you  that 
the  fairies  are  too  small  to  be  seen.  But  I  tell  you  they  are 
too  mighty  to  be  seen.  For  they  are  the  elder  gods  befoie 
whom  the  giants  were  like  pigmies.  They  are  the  Elemental 
Spirits,  and  any  one  of  them  is  larger  than  the  world." 

Such  an  atmosphere  surrounding  the  conjurer,  even  after  he 
has  thrown  off  his  innocently  assumed  disguise,  ill  comports 
with  the  scornful  materialism  of  the  brother  Morris.  The  lat- 
ter is  not  slow  to  express  his  scorn  of  the  conjurer  and  loudly 
to  assert  his  complete  understanding  and  explanation  of  every  one 
of  the  conjurer's  tricks.  He  does  not  hesitate  to  fall  repeatedly 


j£  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

into  an  angry  contempt  of  the  latter,  who  is  a  sincere  thought- 
ful person  and  evidently  imbued  with  a  deeper  and  truer  real- 
ization of  some  greater  power  about  the  ordinary  manifesta- 
tions of  life  than  he  for  one  moment  claims  can  reside  in  the 
simplicity  of  his  hired  tricks.  These  he  can  afford  to  set  aside 
with  as  little  hesitation  as  that  with  which  Morris  manifests 
his  disbelief,  but  while  Morris  storms  and  all  present  are  in 
doubt,  he  permits  himself  a  few  manifestations  of  the  greater 
secret  power  in  which  he  believes  and  shakes  the  matter  of  fact 
complacency  of  all  the  company,  except  perhaps  that  of  Patricia. 
Morris  actually  becomes  seriously  ill,  mentally  unbalanced,  so 
that  the  doctor  has  to  implore  the  conjurer  at  the  last  to  give  some 
material  explanation  of  his  doings  to  save  the  young  man's 
reason  from  permanent  collapse.  And  the  conjurer  does  devise 
some  natural  explanation  and  with  a  lie  to  his  own  convictions 
trumps  up  this  explanation  to  restore  the  young  man  again  to 
faith  in  his  own  rationalism.  No  one  but  Patricia  receives  a 
full  explanation  of  the  conjurer's  connection  with  the  unseen 
forces  of  Magic  but  so  complete  is  her  appreciative  sympathy 
that  she  is  allowed  to  symbolize  it  in  a  conventional  ending  to 
the  play  by  walking  with  him  out  of  the  house  to  throw  in  her 
life  henceforth  with  his. 

Suppose  that  it  is  granted  that  the  author  of  the  play  has  taken 
the  liberty  to  set  his  conjurer  forth  in  the  light  of  a  "  spirit- 
ualist "  and  to  permit  the  playgoers  thus  much  of  an  explanation 
for  the  trick  man's  behavior.  The  writer  has  even  introduced 
certain  events  which  he  has  left  otherwise  inexplicable,  and  the 
human  intellect  can  think  only  in  explicable  terms.  It  demands 
some  rationalization,  some  explanation  or  staggers  and  falls  be- 
fore it.  Therefore  for  the  dramatic  effect  the  spiritualism  may  be 
let  pass.  A  more  important  question  exists  in  regard  to  the 
human  truth  touched  upon,  the  actual  facts  of  the  human  mind, 
of  its  affective  side,  which  far  exceeds  this  limited  but  imperious 
intellect.  Is  there  some  justification  in  human  psychic  experience 
and  content  for  the  developments  of  the  play  and  some  reason 
here  which  would  even  permit  that  we  should  leave  the  spirit- 
ualistic stand  as  a  convenient  hitching  post  for  the  fleeting  mat- 


'  MAGIC:  '  AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS  17 

ters  of  this  deeper  affective  life,  while  we  examine  the  deeper 
meaning  of  the  play  in  the  light  of  this?  Can  it  be  possible 
that  here  also  a  healing  touch  of  understanding  is  possible  in 
regard  to  some  of  the  most  real  and  persistent  problems  con- 
fronting the  human  race  at  all  times?  For  some  reason  practical 
achievement  and  the  science  with  which  it  works  have  consti- 
tuted only  pitfalls  for  the  young  man  and  turned  him  violently 
and  insistently  away  from  any  semblance  of  belief  outside  his 
petrol  well  and  the  material  success  he  there  attains.  Past  ex- 
perience has  been  too  rich  and  deep,  the  clergyman  at  least 
would  say,  to  make  it  possible  that  it  could  all  be  crammed  into 
such  values  or  explained  only  in  the  light  of  the  measurements 
that  pertain  strictly  to  these  externalities.  Yet  the  young  business 
man  ruthlessly  seizes  any  outstanding  belief  in  such  past  ex- 
perience and  reduces  its  content  quickly  to  such  cramping  di- 
mensions, or  he  tries  to  imagine  that  he  does.  He  breaks  out 
"  Well,  sir,  I  just  want  that  old  apparatus  that  turned  rods  into 
snakes.  I  want  those  smart  appliances,  sir,  that  brought  water 
out  of  a  rock  when  old  man  Moses  chose  to  hit  it." 

The  conjurer's  interpretation  ascribes  a  mysterious  and  in- 
explicable power  to  a  man  through  converse  with  spirits,  devils 
as  well  as  fairies,  which  the  conjurer  thinks  he  has  brought 
out  of  former  experiences  when  he  had  "  mixed  with  many 
queer  sets  of  people."  He  soon  found  that  these  spirits  "  tried 
to  be  my  masters  ...  I  found  they  were  not  fairies.  I  found 
the  spirits  with  whom  I  at  least  had  come  into  contact  were 
evil  .  .  .  awfully,  unnaturally  evil,"  while  before,  "  as  long  as 
these  things  were  my  servants  they  seemed  to  me  like  fairies." 
Modern  psychology  has  attempted  by  sympathetic  and  most  sim- 
ple research  into  the  activities  of  the  mind  to  find  some  ex- 
planation which  lies  more  closely  actually  in  the  experiences  of 
that  mind  itself  and  which  can  thus  dispense  with  such  extrane- 
ous source  of  explanation.  The  study  of  the  content  of  dreams 
and  the  active  wishes  of  the  human  mind,  unknown  to  ordinary 
consciousness  but  admissible  to  consciousness  when  the  dreams 
are  laid  bare  through  the  aid  of  association,  finds  ample  ground 
in  the  wish  of  man  for  all  the  strangeness  and  variety  of 


jg  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

mystery  that  has  otherwise  been  attributed  to  outside  agency. 
Men  have  not  yet  shaken  themselves  from  the  shackles  of  such 
interpretation  by  which  the  savage  still  explains  even  his  dreams 
of  the  night  as  the  work  of  whispering  spirits  from  without  or 
the  excursions  into  strange  regions  of  his  own  spirit  leaving 
the  body  during  his  sleep. 

Now  psychology  is  coming  to  believe  that  the  wish  or  more 
fundamentally  the  inner  drive  which  is  the  very  urge  of  life, 
its  preservation  and  its  reproduction  in  the  most  extensive  sense, 
is  productive  of  such  a  variety  and  complexity  of  wishes  and 
impulses  that  the  strange  variety  of  manifestation  in  thought 
and  dream  and  feeling  may  have  its  source  only  there.  Then 
at  the  same  time  psychological  investigation,  especially  that  anal- 
ysis which  patiently  reduces  the  more  complex  and  obscure  mani- 
festations to  their  simpler  origin,  discovers  that  the  human  mind, 
mystified  at  itself,  has  always  resorted  to  a  "  projection  "  of  its 
inner  content  over  upon  external  objects  in  order  to  satisfy  the 
reasoning  intellect  with  an  obvious  objective  explanation.  There- 
fore psychoanalysis  dispenses  with  the  necessity  of  juggling  with 
spirits.  It  is  sufficiently  easy  for  one's  own  overwrought  mind, 
working  mostly  in  unconscious  emotional  activity,  to  people  a  room 
with  strange  presences  so  that  even  the  level  headed  doctor  says 
the  "  room  is  simply  horrible  "  and  the  clergyman  cries  out  in 
the  dark  "  In  God's  name,  go  "  And  the  duke  with  his  char- 
acteristic conciliatory  attitude  even  toward  spirits  says  "  Room 
horrible?  Room  horrible?  No,  no,  no.  Only  a  little  crowded. 
A  little  crowded.  And  I  don't  seem  to  know  all  the  people. 
We  can't  like  everybody.  These  large  at-homes.  .  .  ." 

The  conjurer  is  sincere,  he  is  not  playing  a  cowardly  trick  of 
self  deceit  for  he  is  as  well  convinced  as  the  others,  and  through 
his  varied  experience  with  life  he  is  full  of  outer  and  inner 
conflict.  "  My  mother  was  a  lady  and  she  married  a  dying  fiddler 
who  tramped  the  roads,"  gives  the  key  to  much  that  might  be 
vexing  and  distracting  him  in  inner  struggle  and  outward  ad- 
justment, and  which  demands  the  interposition  of  the  spiritual- 
istic definition  to  posit  and  name  the  conflicts  that  ensue.  There- 
fore he  is  equally  in  need  of  the  current  self  deceiving  explanation 


"  MAGIC:  "  AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS  19 

with  which  the  world  has  been  now  perhaps  too  long  content, 
with  which  at  any  rate  it  vexes  its  own  credulity  and  peace  of 
mind.  The  mechanism  of  the  play  permits  the  picture  on  the 
wall  to  sway,  the  chair  to  fall  and  the  doctor's  lamp  outside, 
which  has  served  as  an  object  of  reality  to  hold  them  all  sane, 
to  turn  its  color  in  a  quite  inexplicable  way.  It  is  feeble  to 
say  that  all  this  is  due  to  the  superficial  bewiderment  of  the 
overwrought  minds  of  the  conjurer's  audience.  The  author  of 
the  play  has,  at  least,  for  the  entertainment  and  mystification  of 
his  audience  laid  more  serious  weight  upon  these  things  than 
that.  Perhaps  however  having  admitted  so  much  it  is  still  per- 
mitted a  clear  eyed  psychology  to  grant  this  as  a  dramatist's 
privilege  to  give  a  tangible  expression  of  the  actual  psychic 
factors.  These  again  are  to  be  found  alone  in  the  deeply  aroused 
impulses  and  affects  in  the  hearer's  minds,  doctor,  clergyman, 
duke,  even  the  correct  secretary  Hastings,  who  have  been  sub- 
jected to  a  rousing  of  their  inner  feelings,  a  questioning  of 
their  grounds  of  action  and  belief,  an  unrecognized  approach 
to  those  things  that  lie  deepest  in  all  men  at  all  times.  The 
structure  of  the  drama  permits  the  result  to  be  projected  into 
an  objective  representation  of  these  mysteries,  while  psychology 
reduces  them  to  these  internal  subjective  activities. 

This  is  a  deeper  science  than  that  of  the  brother  who  believed 
that  his  science  "  will  find  out  that  cause,  and  sooner  or  later 
your  old  miracle  will  look  mighty  mean."  It  is  rather  the  science 
of  the  clergyman,  who  can  believe  in  greater  things  than  those 
the  merely  physiological  eye  can  see.  He  would  admit  with 
the  conjurer  that  the  fairy's  head  is  "  above  all  the  stars  and 
his  feet  amid  the  floors  of  the  sea  .  .  .  the  fairies  are  too  mighty 
to  be  seen.  .  .  .  They  are  the  Elemental  Spirits,  and  any  one 
of  them  is  larger  than  the  world."  For  he  believes,  though 
he  cannot  yet  define  this  precisely  to  himself,  that  there  is  some- 
thing in  the  human  mind,  or  rather  some  great  product  of  its 
emotions  and  its  cogitations  upon  them,  which  has  produced 
the  need  for  belief.  It  has  also  produced  out  of  itself  its  ob- 
jects of  belief,  its  steadying  explanations  which  serve  for  a  time 
at  least  for  the  management  and  rational  control  of  this  same 


2O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

irrepressible  and  otherwise  uncontrollable  mental  affective  life. 
He  has  at  least  a  pragmatic  sense  of  the  truth  of  the  useful- 
ness of  such  beliefs  because  they  are  both  fixed  for  a  certain 
time  and  yet  transformable  when  progress  demands  it,  to  give 
room  for  others. 

So  he  too  can  realize  a  product  of  all  this  changing,  fluctuating 
but  ever  active  mental  life  which  furnished  an  "  apparatus  for 
writing  the  book  of  Job."  It  forms  all  the  bigger,  wider  life 
around  the  small  point  of  our  rational  conscious  attention,  and 
makes  us  ask  reverently  with  the  clergyman,  and  with  the  writer 
of  Job,  "  Where  shall  wisdom  be  found,  and  what  is  the  place 
of  understanding  ? "  At  the  same  time  he  shows  his  practical 
appreciation  of  the  silent  but  no  less  forceful  service  which 
belief  renders  in  different  ages  and  in  different  kinds  to  the 
safeguarding  of  the  sanity  and  to  the  practical  effectiveness  of 
the  spirit  of  the  race.  "And  what  harm  came  in  believing  in 
Apollo?  And  what  a  mass  of  harm  may  have  come  from  not 
believing  in  Apollo  ?  .  .  .  Why  can't  you  leave  the  universe  alone 
and  let  it  mean  what  it  likes?  Why  shouldn't  the  thunder  be 
Jupiter?  More  men  have  made  themselves  silly  by  wondering 
what  the  devil  it  was  if  it  wasn't  Jupiter.  .  .  .  The  child 
who  doubts  about  Santa  Claus  has  insomnia.  The  child  who 
believes  has  a  good  night's  rest." 

The  brother  is  completely  overthrown  by  the  revelation  of 
such  a  vaster  world  than  that  he  thought  was  his,  while  the 
sister  passes  unscathed  and  undisturbed  through  the  experiences 
of  the  night.  Her  only  grievance  lies  in  the  fact  that  her  faith 
was  shaken  by  the  disillusionment  in  regard  to  her  dreams  of 
fairies  through  the  appearance  of  a  human  man  under  the  fairy 
guise.  Yet  this  grievance  is  wiped  away  when  the  mere  man 
has  restored  her  faith  in  something  dwelling  in  him,  something 
more  than  that  which  is  closely  visible.  She  can  stand  to  one 
side  and  be  taught,  for  she  already  knows.  She  has  entered  in, 
rather  she  has  never  forced  herself  without.  She  gradually  slips 
into  reality  from  the  child  world  so  that  to  her  there  is  no  fear 
and  blind  self  defending  struggle  against  the  deeper  realities  of 
the  human  nature  which  she  shares.  She  only  knows  that  slight 


'  MAGIC:  "  AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS  21 

transition  which  is  barely  a  shock  out  of  the  fairy  land  of  child- 
hood into  the  possibility  of  the  womanhood  where  fairy  tales 
"  end  only  by  coming  true."  The  conjurer,  who  understands, 
is  at  hand  to  lead  her  out,  and  he  is  allowed  to  do  this  through 
the  potent  force  of  love. 

The  brother's  situation  is  the  sadder  result  of  an  inability  to 
recognize  the  inner  psychic  life  and  of  a  strong  defense  set  up 
against  its  wishes,  which  appear  then  only  negatively  and  un- 
pleasantly to  him.  He  is  hindered  from  entering  the  border 
world  of  fairy  land  where  his  sister  has  walked  and  found  the 
way  into  womanhood.  Material  seeking  and  material  success, 
perhaps  it  will  be  said,  stand  in  his  way  and  harden  his  heart. 
Such  explanations  are  always  given  first  and  will  continue  to 
be  given  just  so  long  as  we  close  our  eyes  to  the  real  stream  of 
duration  which  is  life  and  seek  its  meaning  in  the  attempts  that 
have  been  made  to  escape  to  this  side  or  that.  Afraid  of  the 
"  forms  that  swim  and  the  shapes  that  creep "  man  leaves  this 
deeper  reality  of  emotion,  where  is  his  true  home,  and  throws 
up  his  static  defenses  behind  which  he  stands  safe  but  poorer, 
scoffing  at  those  who  dare  try  the  depths  of  the  unconscious  life 
to  know  what  is  there;  to  know  and  gather  from  it  that  won- 
drous inspiration  which  makes  its  fairy  tales  no  longer  child's 
dreaming,  ineffectual  or  even  dangerous,  but  gives  them  reality 
and  brings  them  to  pass  in  external  satisfying  love,  activity. 

The  brother  misses  this  and  why?  Because  his  dream  life 
is  in  the  dark  and  he  has  to  deny  it  and  then  like  most  men  he 
seeks  an  external  rationalistic  explanation,  calling  this  science. 
Back  in  that  very  far  away  child  world  of  dreams  brother  and 
sister  probably  meant  much  to  each  other.  The  small  family 
group,  we  know,  fills  the  love  circle  so  exclusively  that  there 
is  no  room  for  an  intruder.  Here  lies  the  key  to  the  strong 
taboo  attached  to  wishes  which  concern  the  child  soul.  Since 
child  wishes,  like  all  others,  are  imperishable,  as  time  goes  on 
and  one  must  fit  into  a  larger  world  repression  comes  to  take 
the  place  of  a  destruction  of  these  desires.  But  repression,  as 
has  been  seen,  changes  the  character  of  pleasure  to  hideousness. 
Patricia  has  been  able  to  follow  the  course  which  is  the  lot  of 


22  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

the  healthy  individual  and  gradually  shift  her  childish  intense 
love  through  the  kindly  fairy  world  over  upon  her  strange  wiz- 
ard and  then,  with  but  a  slight  resistance,  on  the  man  whose 
size  the  magician  has  kindly  assumed.  The  brother  has  fallen 
into  the  fate  of  a  large  number  of  less  fortunate  souls,  whose 
original  desires  are  perhaps  more  intense  or  their  capacity  for 
this  gradual  shift,  sublimation,  is  limited.  Such  are  compelled, 
then,  to  set  up  stern  barriers,  which  manifest  themselves  in 
hatred-colored  reactions  like  those  the  brother  displays  toward 
the  conjurer. 

The  very  emphatic  flatness  of  their  denial  is,  besides,  a  token 
of  the  reality  of  the  forces  which  work  unseen  within.  A  man 
laughs  loudest  on  the  edge  of  the  precipice.  The  ground  trem- 
bles underneath  the  brother's  feet  so  he  but  stamps  the  harder 
and  rushes  the  more  madly  to  prove  to  himself  and  all  con- 
cerned that  unseen  forces  are  non-existent,  simply  nothing  what- 
ever, perfectly  explicable  by  his  self  defensive  scientific  per- 
spicacity. 

And  then  —  and  then  —  that  cry  from  the  darkened  garden 
when  the  conjurer  has  proved  himself  the  master  and  asserted 
the  existence  and  power  of  the  unconscious  factors.  Deny  the 
unconscious  as  one  will,  build  up  all  the  objective  defenses  of 
which  rationalism  is  capable,  there  is  that  within  any  one  which 
makes  itself  heard  sooner  or  later,  in  one  way  or  another.  The 
brother  hears  it  now  when  science  fails  to  give  its  explanation. 
Two  ways  are  open  for  him,  that  one  which  his  sister  has  found 
more  easily  and  naturally,  acceptance  of  the  wish  world  within 
and  coming  to  terms  with  it  in  a  wholesome  re-adaptation  of 
it  to  adult  life  beyond  the  infantile  confines,  or,  failing  that, 
its  acceptance  of  him  and  drawing  of  him  down  into  the  depths 
where  it  would  have  him  in  its  power  again,  the  victim  of  a 
psychosis.  A  third  way,  however,  makes  a  short  cut  to  the  end 
of  the  play  as  it  serves  to  short  circuit  the  conflict  for  many 
lives  —  and  thus  often,  to  be  sure,  prevents  a  sublimation  which 
would  greatly  enrich  life.  This  way  the  conjurer,  who  under- 
stands, who  stands  between  the  two  spheres  of  man's  life  and 
looks  both  ways,  gives  back  to  the  young  man.  He  affords  him 


'    MAGIC :    '  AND  THE  UNCONSCIOUS  23 

again  the  defense  of  his  limitations  and  allows  him  a  satisfactory 
materialistic  explanation  for  those  things  he  is  too  narrowed 
and  undeveloped  to  understand. 

The  playwright  has  run  his  fingers  over  the  keyboard  and 
touched  the  note  that  one  or  another  sounds  in  this  life  conflict 
with  unseen  powers,  priest  and  doctor,  the  duke  and  his  self  ef- 
facing secretary,  brother  and  sister,  but  the  conjurer  stands 
frankly  on  the  border  line  and  in  reality  in  the  fuller  meaning 
of  his  character  sweeps  the  whole  range  of  the  harmony.  He 
knows  the  demons  and  where  they  lurk  even  as  he  knows,  like- 
wise, the  sphere  above  our  limited  conscious  outlook.  He  can 
take  the  stature  of  a  man  because  "  his  head  reaches  beyond 
the  stars."  The  clergyman  has  looked  into  the  remote  beyond 
and  has  seen  in  part  what  lay  before  and  thus  the  relation  of 
that  land  beyond  to  the  childhood  of  man.  Without  this  com- 
pleter  knowledge  we  miss  the  relation  of  this  sphere  of  the 
"  fixed  stars  "  immeasurably  above  effort  and  inspiration,  to  the 
present  height  of  man. 

With  the  whole  in  view  it  is  possible  to  find  and  value  that 
from  which  man  springs.  Man  knows  the  unconscious  as  the 
world  that  harbors  creatures  that  prove  to  be  only  his  wishes 
or  oftentimes  those  wishes  distorted  by  necessity  of  denial.  He 
harbors  them  because  the  value  of  their  inspirational  power,  the 
impulse  they  contain,  must  not  be  lost  though  their  form  is 
changed.  Then,  because  their  form  must  be  altered  while  yet 
this  their  power  must  be  kept  and  used,  he  projects  them  through 
a  mighty  arc  to  the  space  above,  exalting  them  to  the  skies. 
There  also  he  no  longer  recognizes  them  as  his  but  they  become 
a  more  authoritative  inspiration,  spiritualized,  transcendent,  a 
goal  of  limitless  striving  and  aspiration. 

There  is  magic.  Man  is  surrounded  by  it.  Out  of  it  he  arises, 
toward  it  he  tends.  It  is  the  greater  reality  in  which  the  small 
point  of  his  conscious  moment  glimmers  like  the  doctor's  warm 
red  light  in  the  greater  blackness  of  the  night.  This  blackness 
now  and  then  blazes  forth  in  the  lightning  that  overwhelms  the 
poorer,  limited,  material  ray,  and  at  times  inexplicably  changes 
the  color  of  the  latter  to  its  own  capricious  hues.  It  is  an  un- 


24  PSYCHOANALYSIS    AND    THE    DRAMA 

deniable  necessity  that  man  shall  break  away  from  the  child 
world  of  fairy  dreams  if  he  will  find  the  world  of  man's  activity 
and  constructive  life.  It  is  no  less  a  necessity  for  this  very 
creativeness,  that  he  project  and  keep  ever  advancing  and  re- 
ceding before  him  this  larger  world  of  the  complete  reality  in 
which  he  lives  and  moves  and  has  his  being. 


CHAPTER    III 

VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE1 

A  mystic  drapery  is  given  also  to  "  Eyes  of  Youth  "  but  only 
as  a  curtain  which  is  drawn  aside  with  each  succeeding  act  or 
"  episode "  to  let  the  actual  factors  appear  in  their  working. 
The  girl  Gina  Ashley,  daughter  in  a  modest  American  home, 
firm  in  its  traditions,  is  confronted  with  the  various  possibilities 
which  life  seems  able  to  afford  her.  She  may  not  choose  them 
all  however  and  she  stands  halting  among  their  desirabilities. 
She  possesses  a  voice  of  no  uncertain  promise  and  the  oppor- 
tunity is  at  hand  to  go  abroad  under  the  direction  and  care  of 
her  Italian  teacher  to  perfect  this  voice  and  acquire  wealth  and 
fame.  Yet  near  at  hand  are  the  duties  to  a  widowed  father 
and  a  somewhat  dependent  brother.  They  need  her  care  and 
even  her  pecuniary  aid,  for  the  one  is  still  hardly  more  than 
a  schoolboy,  the  other  is  on  the  downhill  road  of  business  loss 
and  failure.  Still  further,  remaining  at  home  might  mean  the 
gratification  of  the  father's  wishes  and  aid  to  the  brother  through 
a  life  of  ease  for  herself,  for  her  father  desires  her  marriage 
to  a  wealthy  but  older  suitor,  whose  claim  to  her  hand  has 
nothing  of  sincere  romantic  love.  Beyond  all  these  is  the 
younger  man  of  her  own  liking  but  who  is  only  at  the  uncertain 
threshold  of  his  career  and  whose  offer  of  love  does  not  yet 
weigh  heavily  enough  in  the  balance  against  greater  wealth  and 
surer  success  on  the  one  hand,  or  the  call  of  duty  on  the  other. 
In  her  perplexity  she  longs,  as  many  have  done,  for  some  sudden 
and  complete  revelation  of  the  future,  something  clear  and  far- 
sighted  by  which  her  decision  might  be  reached.  This  wish  is 
almost  anticipated  by  an  Indian  Yogi  who  has  just  arrived  to 

1  Printed  in  the  Medical  Record,  March  2,  1918,  under  title  "  Eyes  of 
Youth " :  A  Drama  of  Past  Influences  and  Future  Possibilities.  Carlton 
Gliddens  with  collaboration  of  Max  Marcin :  Eyes  of  Youth. 

25 


26  PSYCHOANALYSIS    AND    THE    DRAMA 

offer  some  strange  wares.  He  permits  her  three  opportunities 
to  gaze  into  the  crystal  ball,  only  three,  after  which  she  may 
be  free  to  choose  according  to  the  visions  which  have  met  her 
there.  Three  possible  careers  are  thus  opened  to  her  contem- 
plation, the  visions  of  them  appearing  as  if  given  her  from 
without,  from  one  holding  something  of  the  mystery  of  the  fu- 
ture in  his  power.  The  steady  gazing  into  their  depths  reveals, 
however,  such  defeat  and  disappointment,  such  play  of  passion 
and  such  disillusionment  that  her  terror  of  these  possibilities 
brings  her  to  the  real  center  of  herself  and  she  is  glad  in  the 
end  to  choose  most  simply  the  path  of  the  true  sincere  love  of 
her  heart.  With  it  she  is  able  to  enter  into  a  life  as  free  from 
artificiality  and  false  selfishness  as  it  is  free  to  follow  the  better 
and  more  honest  dictates  of  this  most  inner  self  seeking  its  own 
best  welfare. 

In  this  drama  as  in  the  preceding  one,  the  mystic  element,  as 
embodied  in  the  Indian  sage,  the  Yogi,  and  his  crystal  ball,  may 
be  reduced  to  human  dimensions  or  rather,  it  should  be  said, 
extended  to  include  those.  For  their  depth  and  breadth  exceeds 
any  single  concentration  upon  the  crystal  and  all  that  this  can 
reveal. 

Few  are  bold  or  brave  enough,  nor  are  they  sufficiently  skilled 
in  a  fearless  self  mastery  to  recognize  mysterious  possibilities 
of  action  and  events  that  do  take  place,  as  prepared  and 
determined  only  within  themselves,  and  finally  given  forth  with 
all  the  color  and  vitality  of  the  unconscious  secret  wish.  This 
indeed  it  is  which  has  set  man  to  calling  in  the  aid  of  demons 
first,  kinder,  wiser  spirits,  later  on  devils  and  gods,  then  all  the 
continued  mysticism  of  hallucination  to  satisfy  his  demand  for 
cause  even  while  it  enabled  him  to  fling  away  all  personal  re- 
sponsibility. At  the  best  it  has  kept  him  humbly  loyal  and  trust- 
ing toward  a  beneficent  divine  Spirit  of  good.  But  he  has 
shrunk  from  a  more  resolute  self  control  through  knowledge 
that  his  possibilities  and  the  so-called  accidents  of  his  fate  lay 
largely  in  himself.  He  has  shunned  the  acknowledgment  of 
such  a  reality,  one  beset  with  dangers  to  his  own  spirit  but  best 
met  and  attacked  by  a  knowledge  of  these  things  as  they  exist 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  27 

in  the  heart  of  man,  or  as  the  very  inner  man,  his  inherent 
energy,  his  creative  self,  acts  and  reacts  upon  this  reality. 

Certain  phenomena,  mysteriously  called  "  psychic,"  as  if  the 
psychic  were  a  thing  apart  or  unusual  to  life,  seem  to  some  to 
give  him  access  to  a  special  form  of  mysticism  in  which  his 
projections  take  shape  and  appearance  out  of  his  dominant 
wishes,  hallucinations  half  in  the  dark,  whisperings  as  of  a  world 
of  spirits  visible  to  some  privileged  or  specially  qualified  ones, 
under  peculiar  conditions  and  special  circumstances  and  states 
of  mind. 

Others  have  seen  in  hypnotic  phenomena,  automatic  writing, 
crystal  gazing,  strange  revelations  which  were  not  of  the  or- 
dinary clear  light  of  day.  Wonder  and  fear  have  arisen  as  if 
again  there  were  something  outside  the  self  playing  upon  it,  or 
something  which  certain  gifted  selves  could  appropriate  peculi- 
arly for  themselves  and  for  others.  For  any  or  all  of  these  things 
the  Indian  Yogi,  with  his  soft  air  of  mystery,  his  cautious, 
gentle  manner  steeped  in  the  ancient  introspective  philosophy  of 
the  Orient,  has  constituted  a  most  suitable  agent.  Even  the 
uniform  grayness  of  his  garments  is  suggestive  of  the  calm  of 
death  and  complete  repose,  where  questions  and  problems  of  re- 
ality and  its  perplexing  need  for  choice  are  stilled  in  release  from 
all  personal  endeavor.  The  background  his  presence  gives  is 
strangely  suited  for  dark  mystery.  His  own  brooding  acquain- 
tance with  the  inner  subjective  things,  though  he  too  has  still 
his  external  terms  for  them,  makes  him  the  bearer  of  messages 
from  the  mystic  and  ascribes  to  him  the  power  to  penetrate  the 
hidden  things  of  the  future.  His  exaltation  of  sentiment  at 
the  same  time  both  stimulates  to  a  truly  spiritual  purpose  and 
leads  to  an  idealization  of  the  mystical  powers  which  then  appear 
as  external.  For  man  has  projected  his  progressive  ideals  through 
the  powers  upon  which  he  thought  he  leaned,  in  this  way  throw- 
ing upon  them  the  responsibility  and  need  for  endeavor  which 
should  have  been  his  own.  Thus  he  has  both  made  progress  and 
limited  that  progress  at  the  same  time,  making  his  way  a  slow 
and  tortuous  one. 

"  There  is  no  past  or  future  in  time  as  in  space.  Each 
stretches  to  eternity."  So  far  the  Indian  sage,  the  Yogi  of  the 


28  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

drama,  has  pointed  out  the  littleness  of  the  present  moment 
of  action  amid  the  resistlessness  of  the  entire  onward  move- 
ment which  is  life.  A  great  quiet  sea,  yet  heaving  beneath 
the  calm  surface  with  the  whole  of  gathered  experience,  such 
is  the  past  behind  each  individual.  Before  loom  the  impenetrable 
mists  of  the  unbounded  future.  The  affairs  of  each  moment 
are  no  more  than  a  tiny  point  of  rock  emerging  where  the  ever- 
increasing  ocean  of  the  past  pours  its  influence  over  into  the 
instant  that  breaks  at  once  toward  the  eluding  future.  The 
moment  has  already  joined  the  past,  the  unknown  future  is  still 
ahead,  the  effort  to  reach  it  is  continued.  Our  feet  touch  the 
point  which  is  the  present  moment  and  it  is  gone ;  we  are  beyond, 
leaping  to  the  next  point  of  time  and  experience.  Vivid,  clear, 
effulgent  with  an  unknown  glow,  each  momentary  halting  place 
is  such  a  small  and  yet  concentrated  instant  of  experience  that 
we  are  driven  bounding  to  the  next  poising  place,  and  still  we 
recoil  before  the  thick  mist  stretching  away  before. 

Yet  there  is  in  the  mental  life  a  glow  that  warms  and  delights 
and  inspires  this  moment  so  richly  filled  even  as  it  takes  flight. 
It  streams  ahead  also  until  the  heavy  fogs  of  the  future  grow 
warm  and  radiant  with  hope  and  promise  or  lurid  with  a  deeper, 
darker  play  of  color  within  the  gloom.  It  is  not  strange  that 
man  has  reached  out  in  every  conceivable  way  to  understand 
the  mystery  before  him,  and  though  he  has  paid  less  conscious 
attention  to  that  behind,  nevertheless  has  sought  vaguely  to  de- 
fine the  influence  which  pressed  upon  him  from  this  immeasur- 
able past.  He  is  ceaselessly  impelled  onward,  ruthlessly  hurled 
forward  to  know  only  when  his  path  has  been  taken  that  it  was 
not  of  the  light.  Why  then  should  each  instant  of  choice  be 
so  laden  with  richness  of  color  and  tone  that  present  and  future 
alike  reveal  themselves  only  to  conceal  themselves  the  more? 
What  is  the  mystery  that  dissolves  itself  into  so  many  elements 
of  pleasure  and  pain,  desire  and  effort,  only  to  perplex  and 
bewilder? 

Man's  first  impulse,  as  has  been  said,  was  to  explain  it  as  of 
some  power  outside  himself,  mostly  malicious,  which  came  and 
went  upon  him  according  to  its  own  caprice.  Or  as  he  felt  the 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  29 

force  of  his  own  desire  and  his  feeble  reasoned  opposition  to 
all  this  pressure  of  his  own  unconscious  life,  he  conceived  a 
sense  of  sin  toward  which  the  external  powers  assumed  an 
attitude  of  punishment.  This  has  not  satisfied  man,  it  does  not 
today,  as  a  sufficient  interpretation  of  cause  and  effect  in  regard 
to  the  mysterious  interdependence  of  present  power  and  past 
influence  and  future  possibilities  of  immeasurable  good  or  ill. 

Science  has  searched  until  it  found  cause  and  effect  in  the 
external  world,  and  thus  released  man  from  his  burden  of 
haunting  powers  in  that  realm.  The  world  within  remains 
however  to  most  unfathomable,  inexplicable,  and  still  holds 
thought  and  vision  bound.  It  is  not  even  called  the  world 
within.  The  effort  of  the  human  mind  to  master  the  spell  of 
its  overwhelming  power  has  always  led  man  to  attempt  to  get 
around  to  the  outside  of  it,  where  he  could  view  it  objectively. 
His  ignorance  however  and  the  helplessness  which  this  incurs 
have  prevented  a  clear  scientific  objectifying  of  the  phenomena 
as  they  really  are,  and  have  led  man  to  juggle  with  these  things, 
deceive  himself  and  misconstrue  them  still  as  forces  and  events 
without  himself.  He  has  externally  projected  his  own  inner 
life,  unknown  to  himself,  in  order  to  get  a  better  view  of  it, 
and  thus  has  only  continued  to  misinterpret  and  fail  of  the 
truth.  Partly  he  has  saved  himself  the  keener  but  perhaps  more 
actually  effective  agony  of  self  recognition  and  self  knowledge, 
which  would  have  given  him  a  better  and  more  earnest  control 
of  inner  as  well  as  outer  conditions. 

This  projection  of  the  subjective  beyond  himself  has  neverthe- 
less been  necessary  to  his  weakness  and  his  slow  mode  of  evolu- 
tion, growth  and  the  mastery  of  self  and  environment,  toward 
which  he  has  been  able  to  make  in  this  way  gradual  progress. 
On  the  other  hand  he  has,  by  this  method  of  blinding  and  defend- 
ing himself,  also  made  the  way  a  slower  and  more  ineffectual  one. 
Moreover  in  the  curious  way  that  satisfies  the  contradictions  of 
human  feeling  or  affectivity,  he  has  enjoyed  the  company  of 
the  specters  he  has  conjured  forth  as  responsible  for  these 
things  of  his  destiny.  His  innate  indolence  has  likewise  taken 
refuge  in  them  from  the  straightforward  endeavor  with  which 


3O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

otherwise  he  must  have  attacked  reality,  to  win  from  it  his  own 
progress  and  to  utilize  it  for  the  progress  of  the  race  to  which 
he  belongs. 

All  this  misinterpretation,  ignorance  in  the  face  of  the  forces 
playing  within  and  through  man,  has  set  his  energies  so  at  cross 
purposes  and  produced  so  much  social  confusion  as  well  as  in- 
dividual pain  and  suffering,  that  many  have  grown  impatient 
with  this  ancient  attitude.  Some  in  sickness  and  despair,  others 
with  a  vision  cleared  and  quickened  by  sympathetic  touch  with 
this  need  of  the  world,  have  dared  to  peer  into  the  mysteries 
which  well  up  around  the  human  individual  and  to  seek  dis- 
entanglement of  the  elements  playing  there.  They  would  bring 
them  into  a  light  of  explanation  and  interpretation  that  some 
control  may  result.  The  sickness  and  despair,  and  the  sympa- 
thetic aid  too,  lie,  to  be  sure,  even  behind  the  effort  to  project 
them  without  and  seek  to  understand  them  thus.  This  however 
only  removes  each  factor  from  the  ocean  of  intermingled  ele- 
ments to  which  it  belongs,  and  therefore  it  is  neither  recognized 
for  what  it  really  is  nor  brought  into  a  harmonious  control. 
It  explains  neither  the  boundless  roll  of  influence  which  sweeps 
into  each  life,  nor  does  it  throw  any  light  within  the  thick  veil 
of  the  future. 

The  scientist,  however,  who  would  also  understand  this  internal 
work  and  turn  an  analytical  light  upon  the  profound  reality  of 
all  this  mystery,  or  the  helpless  victim  who  craves  a  fearless 
knowledge,  has  been  preceded  by  the  artist  whose  intuition 
carries  him  into  the  heart  of. these  things.  Often  his  conscious 
intellectual  thought  has  been  hardly  aware  of  the  things  that 
he  saw  and  yet  his  power  of  intuition  and  his  skill  were  such 
that  he  could  present  them  acceptably  to  the  same  intuitive 
appreciation  and  thus  the  help  of  other  struggling  souls.  The 
dramatist  with  his  ready  appeal  to  a  public  mind,  which  un- 
consciously or  consciously  seeks  behind  its  amusement  some 
deeper  and  more  lasting  help,  has  been  one  of  the  chief  artistic 
servants  here.  Yet  he  too,  in  his  own  partial  intellectual  blind- 
ness and  also  to  meet  the  long  obscured  understanding  of  the 
people,  has  resort  to  the  current  forms  of  thought  and  expres- 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  3! 

sion.  That  which  perhaps  he  sees  much  more  truly  must  still 
make  its  appeal  couched  in  objective  phrases  and  in  persons  and 
events  which  still  represent  the  projecting  tendency  of  the  sub- 
jective mind.  He  must  speak  in  terms  of  the  external  world. 
Such  indeed  is  the  limitation  of  the  means  of  communication 
from  one  individual  to  another,  the  intellectual  limitation  through 
which  greater  subjective  fluid  things  must  be  expressed. 

He  nevertheless  points  the  way  fearlessly  into  the  profound 
underlying  truths.  His  truer  meanings  are  those  which  in  another 
way  become  clear  to  the  psychoanalyst,  who  through  close  ap- 
plication to  the  inner  thoughts  and  feelings  of  the  emotional 
life,  of  the  subjective  personality,  has  come  to  know  the  reality 
and  the  strength  of  such  subjective  life,  which  has  filled  the 
ocean  of  past  experience  with  the  influences  out  of  which  mys- 
teries arise.  These  become  known  largely  through  clinical  ex- 
perience where  the  souls  made  sick  by  the  struggle  and  the  un- 
certainty and  the  buffeting  of  the  sea  of  mystery  and  power 
come  to  bring  their  inner  experiences  and  seek  for  analysis  and 
adjustment.  Such  close  intercourse  with  this  subjective  world 
gives  knowledge  of  it  and  understanding  of  it.  It  makes  one 
clear  visioned  also  to  understand  in  the  artist's  presentation 
certain  indications  and  expressions  of  the  actual  truth  under 
his  artistic  and  superficially  objective  setting  forth  of  these  inner 
realities. 

The  analyst  therefore  recognizes  in  the  artistic  production 
something  which  will  touch,  even  half  unaware,  the  difficulties 
of  those  who  labor  to  know  themselves  in  the  power  of  the 
mysteries.  For  those  who  in  fear  or  desire  would  know  the 
future  before  them,  there  is  to  his  insight  a  better  way  pointed 
out  to  them.  More  effectual  than  a  knowledge  of  just  what  the 
future  may  be  is  a  mastery  of  it  through  themselves  and  through 
the  meeting  of  it  fearlessly  and  efficiently,  whatever  it  may  be. 
There  is  an  opportunity  for  the  awakening  also  through  the 
artistic  appeal  of  those  who  walk  calmly  or  evasively  content 
to  leave  things  as  they  are  and  deaf  to  the  call  for  help  in  uni- 
versal struggle  with  these  powers. 


32  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

"  Eyes  of  Youth "  is  one  of  those  dramas  which  speaks  a 
deeper  language  than  that  which  appeals  first  to  the  conventional 
moralist.  The  serious-minded  theatre-goer  or  the  lighter-hearted 
pleasure-seeker  may  draw  certain  very  obvious  lessons  for 
thought  from  the  cleverly  presented  "  episodes."  They  present 
such  various  possibilities  as  might  offer  themselves  to  the  opening 
life  of  a  talented  girl.  Yet  each  contains  its  bitter,  very  bitter 
draught,  and  their  contemplation  wins  every  one  to  the  value 
of  the  simple  choice  of  the  path  of  simplicity  of  desire.  Any 
number  of  platitudes  might  crowd  about  the  suggested  possi- 
bilities and  the  satisfactory  outcome  which  wipes  clean  the  slate 
in  the  end. 

The  drama  is  however  far  more  profound  than  this.  In  the 
reality  of  life  the  visions  are  not  so  easily  expunged.  The  sim- 
plicity of  the  ending  is  only  one  of  those  balancing  moments 
of  the  present,  behind  which  lies  all  the  influence  of  the  past 
and  before  which  still  looms  the  thick  obscurity  of  the  future. 
Here  stands  the  heroine  at  the  beginning  upon  one  of  the  glitter- 
ing points  of  the  Now,  yearning  before  this  great  future  and 
longing  to  know  whither  she  shall  walk  to  fulfill  its  best  purpose 
for  her.  She  can  only  flutteringly  guess  at  the  meaning  to  her 
young  life  of  the  commendation  and  the  promise  of  her  music 
master.  She  is  however  equally  stanch  to  a  sense  of  duty  im- 
pressed upon  her  soul  by  years  of  training  and  discipline.  Before 
her  open  out  still  other  ways  of  seeming  advantage,  opulence 
and  comfort  on  the  one  hand,  the  freedom  of  young  love  on  the 
other. 

No  one  of  these  paths  nor  any  other  is  however  free  for 
her,  because  something  in  her  inmost  self  determines  events 
upon  any  of  these  pathways.  This  it  is  which  confuses  choice 
and  makes  the  uncertainty  in  knowing  what  is  best  to  seek. 
Unaware  of  this,  yet  feeling  her  helplessness,  she  takes  refuge 
where  human  thought  has  always  found  escape  from  the  burden 
and  terror  of  recognizing  and  acknowledging  the  forces  which 
lie  within  to  determine  each  life  and  its  course.  The  dark 
quiet  form  of  the  Hindu  throws  out  in  objective  relief  her 
groping  within  herself  after  the  determined  course  which  shall 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  33 

lead  her.  There  is  the  mystery  and  remoteness  of  his  world 
as  well  as  the  strangeness  of  his  philosophy  of  another  land  and 
time  to  link  him  with  the  unfathomable  mysteries  within.  Be- 
sides she  can  actually  hold  in  her  hands  the  crystal  ball  that 
burns  with  mystic  splendor.  Touching  it,  grasping  it  she  is 
close,  in  her  concentration  upon  it,  to  the  ocean  of  unknown 
forces  streaming  up  in  fact  through  her  own  life  forces  which 
shape  themselves  into  wish  and  throw  themselves  forward  into 
the  future  course.  Yet  clasping  the  unyielding  glass  she  can 
sufficiently  objectify  the  intangible  strength  of  all  this  mystery 
to  look  upon  it  as  if  apart  from  herself  and  examine  the  ways 
she  would  take. 

For  after  all  what  is  it  but  her  wish  which  stirs  itself,  which 
presents  such  a  complexity  of  events  upon  her  pathway,  even 
those  which  produce  confusion  among  themselves  ?  "  How  could 
I/'  she  questions  in  one  of  the  pauses  among  these  pictured 
events,  "  have  seen  it  otherwise  ?  Could  I  have  wished  it  ?  " 

The  confusion  of  impulse  and  desire  within  her,  the  multiplicity 
of  form  and  possibility  in  which  her  inner  wish  presents  itself 
to  her  limited  conscious  vision,  demand  some  objectifying  aid. 
She  is  ready,  as  man  has  always  been,  to  seize  such  external 
forms  which  circumstance  throws  into  her  way.  Yet  this  proc- 
ess, the  very  cunning  of  the  unconscious  wish  thus  to  gain 
access  to  her  reasoning  thought,  deceives  her  that  it  may  thus 
relieve  her  of  any  overwhelming  sense  of  responsibility  for  the 
creation  of  such  pathways  of  events  as  are  outlined  there. 

Gina  Ashling,  vibrant  in  her  inmost  soul  with  the  possibilities 
and  the  wish  impulses  which  were  harbored  within  her,  could  not 
have  tolerated  the  sudden  naked  revelation  of  these  before  herself. 
She  is  overwhelmed  when,  through  concentration  upon  the  seem- 
ingly mystic  object  in  her  hands  and  a  shutting  away  of  the 
distractions  of  the  external  world,  her  gaze  penetrates  deeper  and 
deeper  into  the  abysses  that  lie  concealed.  To  her  they  are  only 
the  dizzying,  bounding  or  despairing  possibilities  of  the  future. 
And  as  such  they  seem  only  to  come  from  without,  whatever 
may  be  her  share  of  conscious  choice  in  following  them.  Also 
they  are  handed  to  her  as  visions  through  the  medium  of  the 


34 

kindly  sympathetic  and  seemingly  wise  and  noble  Yogi.  Thus 
alone  has  she  courage  to  face  them  not  only,  but  to  acknowledge 
them  as  within  the  scope  of  her  life  and  range  of  her  experience. 

For  hers  is  the  immediate  inheritance  and  cultural  training 
of  a  parentage  and  social  environment  which  expected  and  had 
prepared  a  careful  pathway  of  circumspection,  unselfish  service, 
a  devotion,  even  though  a  too  narrowed  one,  to  the  superficial 
well  being  of  others.  Duty  loomed  large  and  smote  with  a  note 
of  the  New  England  conscience  upon  the  girl  sensitive  by  nature 
and  training.  Yet  even  duty  had  become  very  befogging  because 
it  was  based  upon  the  limited  selfishness  of  those  who  sur- 
rounded her,  and  was  hedged  in  by  their  more  immediate  needs. 
Duty  at  the  sacrifice  of  the  healthy  impulses  and  functions  of 
life,  she  has  to  learn,  cannot  bring  real  values  to  herself  or  her 
family. 

Behind  all  this  nevertheless  lay  a  deeper  inheritance,  which 
reached  much  further  back  into  the  slow  development  of  the 
girl's  full  and  rich  young  nature.  The  elements  within  it  made 
demands  which  swept  far  beyond  these  narrowed  ones  which 
her  devoted  and  dependent  family,  or  her  numerous  lovers  pre- 
sented to  her.  Even  the  prospect  of  self  realization  through 
the  career  which  thrust  its  likelihood  before  her  was  infused 
with  a  power  and  complexity  of  impulses  and  desires  which 
had  been  gathering  strength  throughout  all  the  preparation  of 
this  individual  psychical  life. 

This  heritage  had  slowly  accrued  to  her  through  the  long 
line  of  women  stretching  away  far  beyond  her  immediate  an- 
cestors. This  ocean  of  the  past  which  rolls  unceasingly  behind 
the  present  moment  of  each  life  contains  a  record  of  all  the 
past.  "  All  that  we  have  felt,  thought,  and  willed  is  there  lean- 
ing over  the  present."  So  has  said  one  of  our  modern  thinkers. 
This  explains  the  measurelessness  of  the  past  behind  the  present. 
It  affirms  the  source  of  the  glow  which  spreads  through  this  pres- 
ent and  passes  over  to  color  the  future  for  good  or  for  ill. 
"  All  we  have  felt,  thought,  and  willed  "  —  and  feeling  has  kept 
its  full  value.  Sometimes  we  have  learned  a  new  and  better 
discharge  for  it,  but  in  its  discharge  it  stores  up  yet  richer  affect, 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  35 

the  result  again  of  the  new  experience.  Much  of  it  has  been 
denied  discharge  and  has  not  found  transformation  into  the 
more  cultural  ways  of  expression  that  the  race  has  learned, 
so  that  beaten  down,  it  is  rebelliously  active  there  in  the  un- 
conscious life.  There  are  also  traces  of  its  passage  over  into 
action,  the  further  emotional  response  which  resulted  when  such 
action  took  place.  Some  remaining  desire,  imprisoned,  denied, 
and  the  pleasure  of  phantasy  which  easily  surrounds  this,  all 
are  there  to  produce  and  maintain  an  affective  glow  which  burns 
into  the  present  and  future  and  also  to  keep  alive  and  stimulate 
to  new  and  higher  effort  wishes  which  belong  to  the  long  history 
and  prehistory  which  antedate  modern  life. 

This  it  is  which  explains  the  great  outpouring  of  possibilities 
in  the  three  visions  which  Gina  obtains  into  the  future.  No 
more  than  the  world  acknowledges  the  content  of  its  dreams 
as  arising  out  of  wishes,  which  come  in  such  strange,  grotesque, 
inexplicable  form,  could  her  conscious  thought  recognize  these 
startling  apparitions  of  the  future  possibility  in  all  their  diversity, 
as  expressions  of  her  own  desire.  Yet  the  wish  is  within  her 
inmost  nature,  the  long  train  of  unsatisfied  or  half  satisfied 
desires  stealing  upon  her  individual  life  out  of  the  far  depths 
of  the  past.  She  with  each  individual  has  much  in  common 
with  such  a  line  of  ancestors  reaching  back  through  the  ages 
when  wishes  were  taking  to  themselves  progressing  ways  of 
expression  and  gratification,  which  gradually  built  up  life's  com- 
plexity and  entangled  its  interactions. 

These  wishes  could  not  always  be  granted  or  fulfilled  in  their 
direct  form  because  that  was  crude,  too  self  seeking  and  asocial 
as  society  grew  to  a  greater  culture  involving  the  higher  devel- 
opment of  the  greater  number.  Elemental  desire,  informed  with 
[the  energy  of  life,  was  no  less  active  and  forceful  but  it  had 
to  seek  less  egoistic  ways  of  fulfilment,  losing  therefore  often 
the  immediate  pleasure  for  the  sake  of  a  more  remote  cultural 
gain  and  satisfaction.  These  primitive  wishes  and  their  suc- 
icessors,  which  have  however  also  gradually  yielded  to  cultural 
demands,  remain  deep  within  the  heart  of  every  man  and  woman, 
ey  remain  to  irradiate  the  later  higher  attainments  of  life, 


36  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

spiritualizations,  intellectualizations,  with  an  earthy  glow  that 
keeps  the  life  true  to  the  nourishing  soil  at  the  bottom  from 
which  it  sprang.  Yet  in  the  light  of  higher  attainments  and  the 
restrictions  these  put  upon  each  individual  life  they  dare  not 
stand  in  the  clear  light  of  conscious  recognition  except  in  a 
disguising  symbolism  or  hiding  behind  some  rationalizing  expla- 
nation of  them,  such  as  this  of  the  play. 

They  appear  therefore  as  the  buffetings  of  the  future  from 
the  outside  world.  From  certain  of  them  there  seems  no  escape 
on  any  of  the  paths  that  may  be  chosen. 

This  inner  self,  where  such  wishes  are  stimulated  and  out 
of  which  they  seek  such  indirect  exit,  is  not  like  the  rational 
self  which  we  know  in  our  intercourse  with  one  another.  Be- 
cause of  the  asocial  nature  of  its  wishes,  the  direct  self  gratifi- 
cations which  they  seek  to  obtain,  they  are  obliged  to  hide 
themselves  or  express  their  power  in  such  obscure  and  devious 
ways.  Their  unconscious  harborage  is  notwithstanding  intensely 
emotional  and  the  manner  of  thought  which  surrounds  them  is 
that  of  phantasy,  different  from  the  clear,  logical,  purposeful 
thinking  of  consciousness.  Their  logic  and  purpose  lie  only  in 
the  direct  emotional  impression  of  themselves  into  some  man- 
ner of  fulfilment,  and  this  in  the  face  of  reality  must  be  largely 
only  phantasy  and  pure  wish.  Do  they  escape,  thus  governed 
by  phantasy,  they  distort  reality  to  themselves  and  produce  the 
disorder  and  distraction,  the  disappointment,  suffering  and  pain, 
in  which  the  various  "  episodes  "  end.  They  have  a  service  to 
perform  if  they  silently,  unconsciously  contribute  their  influence 
to  the  clearer  rational  way  of  life,  but  escaping  its  control,  they 
work  unrestrained  havoc  in  individual  and  society. 

Such  the  wishes  paint  the  future  before  Gina.  The  poet 
Hebbel  has  said  of  dreams,  they  "glide  like  shadows  through 
the  soul,  preparing,  warning,  comforting,"  but  the  comfort  here 
turns  to  fear  and  pain  when  she  awakens,  as  do  the  dreams 
of  the  night  when  at  the  point  of  waking  they  pass  over  to 
the  inspection  of  consciousness  and  the  wishes  of  which  they 
are  made  must  become  unrecognized  as  such  in  order  to  pass 
this  exacting  censor.  Gina's  vision  comes  too  close  to  the  wishes 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  37 

as  realities  for  her  recognition  of  them  as  in  any  sense  her 
desires.  They  must  be  clothed  with  fear,  shrinking,  condemna- 
tion, and,  with  the  same  familiar  mechanism  of  shifting  respon- 
sibility, as  due  to  environment,  the  work  of  those  who  sur- 
rounded her. 

Perhaps  it  might  be  hardest  to  admit  that  the  first  "  episode  " 
contained  a  pictured  wish  fulfilment.  Surely  in  the  somber  and 
despairing  close  of  the  five  years  of  humdrum  service  for  her 
family,  in  all  the  loss  and  bitterness  which  are  her  lot,  there 
seems  nothing  that  could  claim  the  roseate  title  of  wish.  This 
episode  ends  in  lonely  sorrow  for  herself,  an  insignificant  school 
teacher,  who  has  failed  in  attaining  her  own  happiness  and  the 
attempt  to  serve  her  family.  The  wishes  which  hide  in  the 
unconscious  are  nevertheless  frequently  strange  to  ordinarily 
recognized  ways  of  thought.  They  do  indeed  hide  a  certain 
strange  pleasure  upon  which  the  ego  feeds,  a  negative  form  of 
pleasure  which  extracts  nourishment  for  the  pleasure  sense  from 
suffering,  a  self  pity  and  a  self  immolation  which  in  the  depths 
satisfy  the  ego  sense.  This  therefore  is  only  a  strange  disguise 
for  the  more  positive  seeking  which  desire  primarily  knows. 

Beneath  this  pathway  of  Duty,  behind  even  Gina's  perplexity, 
which  is  the  cause  of  her  peering  thus  into  her  own  unconscious 
depths,  is  a  race  old  problem.     It  is  the  difficulty  and  inner  re- 
luctance with  which  the  child   separates   from  an  innately   in- 
dolent dependence  upon  parental  love  and  care.     Examination 
of  the  effort  of  both  parent  and  child  to  make  this  necessary 
separation,   whether   it   is   observed   throughout   the  history   of 
man's  racial  development  or  through  investigation  into  the  dif- 
ficulties of  individual  life,  reveals  that  this  bond  is  a  stronger 
i  one  than  has  carelessly  been  supposed.     It  is   founded  in  an 
i   intense  love  and  desire  of  the  child  toward  those  upon  whom 
i  it  has  leaned  for  earliest  absolute  comfort,  support,   care  and 
affection.    The  parent  is  the  object  of  childish  desire  and  of  that 
more  active  aggressive  seeking  of  a  love  object,  which  is  early 
awakened,  and  directed  first  of  all  toward  those  upon  whom 
',  the  child  thus  leans.     Toward  these,  in  its  narrowed  environ- 
ment,  its   feelings   take  on  an   intensity   which   is  not  always 


38  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

sufficiently  displaced  in  later  life  upon  more  external  objects, 
be  they  persons  or  other  objects  for  endeavor. 

Moreover,  since  the  child  is  already  a  sexual  being,  this  love 
has  a  tendency  to  go  out  more  positively  toward  a  parent  of 
the  opposite  sex.  Therefore  a  certain  fixation  upon  such  a 
parent  may  manifest  itself  in  later  life,  or  at  least  it  will  color 
and  determine  later  events  and  later  object  choice.  This  too 
forms  a  guide  for  the  maturing  child,  only  it  also  forms  a 
source  of  danger  as  the  use  of  this  early  tendency  is  exceeded 
and  too  great  demands  are  made  therefore  upon  maturity  to 
conform  to  the  child's  early  pattern  of  wishes. 

The  parent  is  often  no  more  free  than  the  child  in  this  matter. 
Thus  Gina's  father  with  his  almost  whining  dependence  upon 
her  domestic  care  and  affection,  as  well  as  his  grosser  desire 
to  sell  his  daughter's  hand  for  his  own  comfort  and  release 
from  care,  blocks  the  way  to  his  daughter's  path  of  independent 
self  expression.  He  complicates  the  problem  which  is  vexing 
not  only  her  conscious  sense  of  duty,  but  more  deeply  the  un- 
conscious struggle  she  is  making  to  be  free  from  her  own  in- 
clination toward  him.  The  unconscious  impulse  to  prostitute 
herself,  which  fairly  shrieks  aloud  in  the  second  vision  which 
she  has  of  herself,  is  more  quietly  and  so  more  distractingly 
at  work  even  now.  It  too  has  precipitated  the  perplexity  and 
the  desire  to  gain  help  for  her  choice. 

Prostitution  is  a  trailing  into  present  society  of  certain  ancient 
elements  in  a  woman's  love  or  sex  complex  which  once  in  a 
far  more  primitive  society  and  on  through  advancing  periods 
of  its  history  had  definite  social  service  to  perform.  Woman 
as  a  weaker  party  before  male  aggressiveness  could  only  demand 
certain  rights  for  her  protection  and  reward.  In  the  earliest 
forms  of  society  of  which  even  unwritten  record  can  be  found, 
she  was  curiously  protected  in  the  demand  for  these  rights  and 
in  the  exercise  of  them  by  some  male  member  of  her  own  family, 
usually  her  elder  brother.  She  maintained  under  his  protection 
an  exalted  right  in  the  tribe  over  her  children,  and  sometimes 
their  property  and  succession.  Even  in  ancient  civilizations  as 
well  as  in  the  more  barbarous  conditions  of  many  savage  tribes, 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  39 

it  was  her  duty  and  privilege  to  become  the  property  of  a 
stranger  or  group  of  strangers,  either  before  marriage  or  even, 
perhaps  with  a  religious  sanction,  during  marriage.  Thus  was 
her  promiscuity  a  part  of  her  past  history,  an  affective  element 
which  takes  its  place  in  the  preserved  past  of  emotional  ex- 
perience and  uncultural  desire,  once  cultural  now  no  longer  so. 
This  is  doubtless  closely  intertwined,  since  it  was  her  exercised 
right,  function  and  duty,  not  only  with  her  mere  desire,  as  a 
past  source  of  exercise  and  therefore  a  pleasure  for  her,  but 
through  it  she  found  her  source  of  power,  when  power  avenues 
were  largely  closed  to  her  otherwise.  She  is  even  known  in 
earliest  times  to  have  contributed  to  the  brother's  prestige  by 
bearing  children  by  her  husband  or  other  lover  to  count  as  the 
brother's  own.  Her  own  power  and  prestige  lay  therefore  for 
ages  in  the  use  of  her  body.  Through  it  alone  she  was  exalted 
above  man,  dominated  him.  This  was  not  one  man,  but  many 
men,  and  yet  in  most  ancient  periods  at  least,  for  the  service 
of  male  members  of  her  own  family  who  were  thus  particularly 
in  her  power. 

Such  light  from  the  remotest  depths  of  the  past  into  which 
we  can  peer,  shines  forth  with  almost  uncanny  brilliancy  in  the 
light  of  Gina's  possibilities  revealed  in  her  visions.  They  are 
the  result  of  these  anciently  inherited  impulses  based  on  an- 
cestral experiences  in  the  past.  She  strives  to  break  away  from 
father  and  brother,  but  even  when  freedom  seems  to  have 
been  gained,  she  too  utilizes  her  power  over  other  men,  to  bring 
through  her  rewards  both  father  and  brother  into  the  dominance 
by  which  she  makes  them  dependent  upon  her.  Unconsciously 
she  plunders  other  men  while  they  destroy  her,  and  hurls  her 
plunder  at  the  feet  of  the  father  and  brother  whom  she  would 
thus  dominate  and  enslave. 

Therefore  even  in  the  first  vision,  clothed  in  the  garment  of 
self  immolation,  abandoned  to  tears  of  self  torture,  she  has 
sacrificed  herself  to  keep  them  still  in  her  power.  Duty  is  the 
word  with  which  she  covers  it  all,  most  securely  from  herself. 
Duty  is  the  word  impressed  upon  her  by  the  weak  and  faithless 
Louis,  a  third  suitor  for  her  hand  who  proves  faithless  through- 


40  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

out  all  the  three  visions  of  the  possibilities  of  her  future.  She 
has  adopted  his  cravenly  used  word  duty  only  to  find  herself 
in  the  end  its  dupe  and  victim.  Her  father  is  dead,  beyond 
her  power  of  support  and  comfort,  the  brother  Kenneth  has 
grown  pitiably  weak  and  inefficient  in  his  dependence  upon  her. 
Her  sister  has  been  flung  into  the  arms  of  the  unfaithful  lover 
who  once  prated  of  duty  to  her. 

She  has  realized  upon  herself,  and  upon  those  whom  she 
should  rather  have  set  free  to  wrestle  with  reality  for  them- 
selves, an  unconscious  wish  to  be  all  to  them,  to  exercise  the 
peculiar  power  which  only  a  woman  has.  Unable  to  escape  to 
an  external  love,  that  which  for  the  modern  woman  can  truly 
lie  only  in  mutual  service  and  mutual  freedom,  she  has  remained 
in  the  father's  house,  close  to  the  brother  too,  and  has  met  only 
loss  and  disaster  for  them  all.  Still  the  unconscious  is  able  to 
extract  something  for  self,  the  revery  of  bitter  grief  and  freely 
shed  tears.  She  awakens  however  from  such  an  insight  into 
possibilities  within  herself,  repulsed,  but  assured  that  here  is 
not  the  reality  of  her  true  path.  She  will  look  again. 

This  is  the  vision  in  which  her  prostitution  runs  riot.  The 
gleam  of  power  through  her  voice  had  led  her,  but  had  soon 
been  exchanged  for  the  false  brilliancy  of  love's  basest  conquest 
over  men.  It  had  been  the  influence  of  the  man  first  who  had 
stood  in  a  fatherly  relation  to  the  unprotected  girl,  but  who  failed 
in  his  protective  power,  rather  initiating  her  into  the  life  which 
was  the  expression  of  the  fundamental  sexual  father  complex. 
She  had  escaped  the  unconscious  incest  bondage  at  home  only  to 
find  it  confronting  her  in  the  mocking  disguise  of  a  sexual  ex- 
perience with  this  older  man,  which  was  the  beginning  of  the 
riotous  course  of  prostitution  and  domination,  up  to  the  last 
silly  exhibition  of  her  power  to  defy  her  operatic  engagement 
and  fling  herself  more  completely  to  the  infantile  form  of 
pleasure  and  power.  It  is  the  final  culmination  of  the  dom- 
inance, gathered  in  the  brother,  for  whose  sake  and  the  father's 
this  state  of  affairs  largely  existed,  which  breaks  the  destructive 
spell.  When  she  has  goaded  the  brother  to  a  sudden  resolve 
to  murder  this  man,  that  is  to  destroy  the  father  representative 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  4! 

who  had  been  her  ruin,  which  perhaps  will  end  in  the  brother's 
own  final  destruction,  then  the  vision  breaks.  The  girl  can  bear 
no  more.  As  in  the  dream  such  wish  must  be  brought  through 
waking  to  the  light  of  consciousness  for  denial,  rejection,  for 
choice  of  some  other  better  way  to  power. 

One  more  vision  however  must  clear  the  unconscious  atmos- 
phere and  give  her  final  freedom  to  use  in  a  wiser  way  these 
powers  hidden  within  her  soul.  This  time  she  will  yield  more 
distinctively,  more  consciously  to  the  father's  wish.  As  it  streams 
before  her  out  of  her  own  psychical  possibilities,  it  must  be 
her  own  wish  also.  Prostitution  is  decently  clothed  here  in 
society's  sanction,  the  father's  material  comfort  and  freedom 
from  care,  with  beside  the  added  element  of  the  attention  and 
consideration  of  a  grave  gentleman,  apparently  desirous  of  her 
self  as  well  as  to  make  her  comfortable  and  well  provided  for. 

The  unconscious  slavery,  which  is  that  inner  fixation  upon 
the  father,  in  the  infantile  form  of  demanding  the  father's  love, 
provision,  whatever  makes  up  the  child  relation  to  the  father 
in  the  intense  self  seeking  of  the  father,  this  breaks  forth  in 
61ackest  shadow  in  this  episode.  The  dominance  which  she  has 
unconsciously  sought,  providing  again  through  herself  for  her 
father  and  family,  turns  upon  herself.  She  is  the  worse  than 
slave.  She  is  scorned  and  spurned,  flung  aside  without  the 
slightest  consideration.  Her  value  as  the  man's  social  and  sex- 
ual bauble  is  utterly  at  an  end.  Her  downfall  is  brought  about 
by  a  most  false  and  despicable  accusation  on  the  part  of  the  hus- 
band who  has  tired  of  her.  In  fact  this  situation  too  arises  in  her 
own  subjective  vision,  as  again  a  picture  of  the  possibilities 
which  her  own  wish  was  able  to  project  into  the  pathway  of 
the  future.  So  again  it  is  with  the  fact  of  her  own  inner  pos- 
sibilities and  therefore  her  sense  of  guilt  with  which  she  wrestles. 
No  wonder  then  that  morphine  becomes  a  refuge  after  she 
has  been  cast  off  legally  by  her  husband.  No  wonder  also 
that  even  in  the  dream,  the  vision,  she  struggles  in  the  weak- 
ened drugged  condition  against  complete  downfall  again  and 
though  poor,  in  need,  friendless,  lost  to  her  social  world,  yet 
keeps  herself  here  true  to  the  pure  ideals  of  her  girlhood  home. 


42  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

And  this  one  of  the  three  "  episodes  "  ends  through  its  sorrow 
in  hope  and  promise  of  joy  and  life  as  she  is  discovered  and 
rescued  by  her  one  true  lover. 

She  is  prepared  for  the  waking.  This  is  like  the  so-called 
"  preparing  function "  of  the  dream  of  the  night,  which  after 
long  struggle,  yielding  to  primitive,  uncultural  wishes,  and  slow 
conquest  of  them,  seems  at  last  to  take  the  path  out  into  light 
and  victory.  One  who  has  been  submerged  in  the  power  of 
the  baser  unconscious  wishes  and  the  conflict  with  them,  as 
in  a  long  neurosis,  comes  after  a  more  decisive  and  clearer 
wrestle  with  these  through  analysis  of  them  to  a  new  form  of 
wish.  The  way  out  into  a  new  adaptation  to  reality  comes  at 
last  through  an  understanding  of  what  the  more  primitive  wishes 
are  and  where  their  ancient  value  and  their  still  present  power 
lies.  A  pathway  is  found  to  bring  that  power  and  value  out 
into  a  higher  cultural  life,  which  is  the  sublimation  of  them. 
To  this  the  dream  itself  finally  points  the  way. 

So  has  Gina  won  victory  for  herself  and  for  those  whom  she 
would  have  made  thus  blindly  dependent  upon  her,  absorbed  in 
her  dominating  power.  Once  more  in  waking  reality,  with  all  the 
dream  possibilities  unfulfilled,  only  dreams,  she  kindly  but  as- 
suredly refuses  this  last  wish  of  her  father,  as  she  has  already 
refused  the  other  two  courses  which  had  presented  themselves 
to  her.  This  time  her  father  seems  likewise  to  have  attained 
a  new  freedom.  This  comes  about  through  no  mystic  subtle 
influence.  It  results  from  Gina's  simple  matter  of  fact  grasp 
of  reality  for  him  and  for  the  brother.  Her  sublimation  is 
very  real  and  very  complete.  A  few  clear  suggestions  to  the 
father  that  he  shall  simply  utilize  the  reality  which  is  at  his 
hand  and  take  up  his  own  problems,  take  them  up  with  the 
cooperation  of  the  active  young  son,  to  the  advantage  and  for 
the  opportunity  of  self  expression  for  both,  breaks  the  spell  of 
domination  and  dependence.  Then  she  herself  is  at  last  free 
to  turn  to  the  one  lover  with  whom  she  can  meet  on  free  and 
equal  terms  of  mutual  endeavor  and  enterprise.  Eyes  of  Youth 
are  at  last  cleared  to  see  their  way  beyond  the  confines  of  inner 
fixation  out  into  the  privilege  and  possibility  of  a  maturity  freed 


VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  43 

from  the  bonds  of  infancy  skulking  under  false  names  and  de- 
luding pretences. 

There  is  no  boundary  to  the  past  undulating  behind  us.  The 
future  remains  dark  and  impenetrable  before.  Life's  activity 
finds  itself  however  upon  the  clear  moment  that  looms  up  in- 
stantaneously between  past  and  future.  All,  like  this  play  of 
the  theater,  which  reveals  to  us  more  of  the  actual  content  and 
power  of  that  past,  releases  us  from  its  bondage  and  gives  us 
a  freedom  to  receive  its  influence  and  fit  it  successfully  and 
constructively  into  this  quickly  fleeting  present  moment.  In 
this  way  and  this  alone  the  future  becomes  ours.  We  do  not 
penetrate  it.  We  have  no  definite  visions  as  to  where  we  shall 
walk  and  how.  But  its  possibilities  come  within  the  range  of 
our  understanding,  and  we  have  a  better,  nobler  task  than  walk- 
ing a  clearly  defined  path.  It  is  ours  to  grasp  the  influence 
of  the  past,  apply  it  to  reality,  to  opportunity,  so  that  we  make, 
create  the  future  and  mold  it  to  progressively  constructive  ends. 


CHAPTER    IV 
PHANTASY  COMPENSATION  THROUGH  DREAMS  x 

As  the  dream  may  forecast  the  future  through  revelation 
of  the  wish  trend  which  in  the  unconscious  guides  the  course 
of  action,  so  also  it  performs  a  less  progressive  function.  It 
brings  to  view  in  this  the  compensatory  nature  of  the  wishes 
and  the  phantasies  they  produce  to  soften  the  hardness  of  reality 
and  to  substitute  a  phantastic  unreality  for  the  sterner  things 
of  the  world  outside.  This  is  not  an  altogether  harmful  function 
since  first  it  keeps  an  idealism  about  external  actualities  which  is 
in  turn  an  inspiration  to  progress,  an  incentive  to  make  the 
dreams  come  true  in  contact  with  reality  and  through  its  means. 
Besides  this  it  forms  an  aid  and  support  for  the  psychic  ten- 
derness and  sensitiveness  of  a  race  which  is  not  yet  able  to 
meet  openly  and  fully  the  jolts  and  jars  of  the  real  world  of 
endeavor.  Here  however  the  danger  line  is  discerned  and  this 
sensitive  side  of  human  nature  too  soon  throws  the  weight  of 
its  attention  and  interest  so  thoroughly  over  upon  phantasy  that 
connection  with  reality  becomes  to  a  greater  or  less  extent  dulled 
and  confused  and  may  even  reach  a  complete  separation  from 
external  realities. 

Even  the  failure  to  make  of  life  something  of  beauty  and 
value,  which  has  been  called  illness,  has  always  had  its  com- 
pensations. They  serve  to  make  life  and  the  conflict  between 
weakness  and  the  craving  for  success  bearable,  even  if  they  must 
in  part  also  prevent  the  better  solution  and  victory.  Further- 
more in  the  case  of  more  complete  failure  they  substitute  a 
complete  phantasy  gratification  for  the  lost  reality.  The  failure 
is  due  to  the  retreat  of  the  creative  energy  into  paths  which  are 
out  of  touch  with  social  activity,  and  in  a  greater  or  less  degree, 

1  Printed  in  the  New  York  Medical  Journal,  Sept.  3,  1917,  under  title 
Psychotherapy  and  the  Drama.  Drama  by  John  N.  Raphael  from  George 
Du  Maurier's  Peter  Ibbetson. 

44 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION   THROUGH    DREAMS  45 

is  the  energy  has  retreated,  there  is  weakness,  pain,  or  in- 
jffectuality.  Pain  is  sometimes  spared,  weakness  and  ineffec- 
:uality  disguised  by  this  secondary  art  of  compensation,  which 
;erves  reality  only  indirectly,  if  at  all.  If  severance  with 
reality  is  complete  an  utterly  helpless  psychosis  is  the  result. 
Fhe  break  with  reality  is,  however,  rarely  so  entire.  Human 
lature  is  too  plastic  not  to  allow  of  some  sort  of  compromise 
3y  which  art  patches  up,  conceals,  and  even  magnificently  justi- 
ies  its  failures. 

The  mechanisms  are  many  by  which  individuals  in  all  degrees 
}f  success  and  failure  hide  from  themselves  and  largely  from 
the  world  the  measure  and  the  nature  of  the  latter.  This  serves 
the  useful  purpose  of  preserving  one's  own  sense  of  existence 
md  self  importance,  the  foundation  on  which  alone  all  effort 
and  effectualness  are  possible,  relieving  man  of  that  overwhelm- 
ing sense  of  his  own  shortcomings  and  disabilities  which  would 
seriously  hinder  true  progress  by  keeping  him  bowed  under  an 
impossible  burden.  He  is  yet  too  ignorant  of  all  the  impulses 
and  emotional  content  which  make  up  his  history  to  be  granted 
a  clear  scientific  control  over  these  difficulties.  Therefore  a 
certain  amount  of  animistic  projection  is  still  permissible  to 
maintain  this  sense  of  security.  Civilized  man  does  not  drop 
his  weariness,  as  does  the  savage,1  along  with  a  stick  or  a 
stone  as  he  ascends  a  hill,  but  he  still  kicks  the  table  which  he 
has  banged  and  thus  saves  his  decorum  and  dignity  in  the  face 
of  the  defenseless  furniture.  He  has,  however,  far  higher  and 
greater  refinements  whereby  he  casts  from  himself  the  inner 
burdens  and  conflicts  and  the  tragic  failures  which  have  resulted 
from  these.  They  constitute  sometimes  mental  disturbances 
which  cause  society  endless  pain  and  trouble;  at  other  times 
they  pass  over  into  exquisite  dreams  both  of  pleasure  and  of  pain. 

Ordinary  man  attempts  unwittingly  these  matters  of  artistic 
substitution  and  projection.  His  success  is  ugly  or  beautiful  in 
varying  degrees.  Here,  however,  is  the  place  of  the  true  creative 
artist  who  can  take  this  material  also  from  the  mill  of  human 

1  See  Frazer :  The  Golden  Bough,  Part  VI,  The  Scapegoat,  p.  i  ff. 
Third  edition.  Macmi!!an  and  Co.  1913. 


46  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

experience,  which  is  both  individual  and  common  experience, 
and  so  deal  with  it  and  reconstruct  it  that  it  becomes  of  saving 
health  to  the  multitude.  His  art  as  has  been  seen  takes  these 
elements  which  lie  deepest  in  the  human  psyche  and  offers  some 
solution  of  universal  problems  which  will  help  also  the  indi- 
vidual soul  in  its  unconscious  struggle  with  them.  It  may  solve 
problems  by  some  happy  optimistic  ideal  and  thus  transport 
unsatisfied  humanity  to  a  world  of  wish  gratification.  Again, 
it  may  express  in  tragic  form  the  struggle  as  it  rationalizes  and 
disguises  itself  under  the  inevitableness  of  fate  or  a  wiser  Prov- 
idence. Art  accomplishes  all  this  through  its  beauty  and  its 
intuitive  insight  into  the  buried  life  of  the  unconscious.  Its 
beauty  and  success,  moreover,  are  actual  only  because  it  is 
based  upon  the  truth  which  is  universal,  truth  of  the  inner 
conflict  and  of  the  essentially  human  means  of  solution.  This 
truth  may  lie  even  in  the  artistic  portrayal  of  a  solution  which 
fails  to  meet  reality  or  it  may  point  a  better  ideal,  a  more 
effectual  solution.  In  either  case  it  is  because  art  is  able  to 
bridge  the  chasm  between  successful  or  unsuccessful  solution 
that  it  grants  the  unconscious  libido  an  avenue  of  safety  and 
release. 

Its  beauty  and  intuition  carry  its  message  into  the  heart  of 
the  human  conflict  and  afford  that  contact  with  dreams  with 
which  the  psyche  cannot  entirely  dispense,  but  it  does  not  remain 
there.  It  subtly  touches  the  unconscious  by  the  reality  of  the 
problem  presented,  but  it  also  with  equal  subtlety  and  skill  leads 
the  way  back  to  the  reality  of  conscious  thinking  and  the  eval- 
uation of  the  problems  in  the  light  of  this.  Thus  it  both  reveals 
the  way  out  from  a  false  and  dangerous  phantasy  absorption 
in  the  inner  struggle  and  reveals  and  illumines  the  falsely  pro- 
jected defense.  It  so  utilizes  the  latter,  moreover,  that  it  safely 
bridges  the  gap  between  dreaming  false  and  dreaming  true. 

The  story  of  Peter  Ibbetson,  whether  as  first  presented  by 
Du  Maurier  in  his  romance,  or  as  it  has  been  placed  in  the  dram- 
atized form  before  the  public,  has  committed  itself,  more  or  less 
unwittingly  on  the  part  of  the  author  and  the  dramatist,  but 
none  the  less  truly,  to  the  study  of  the  development  of  a  definite 
form  of  defense  reaction  out  of  a  tragic  inner  struggle. 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION   THROUGH   DREAMS  47 

It  is  its  truly  artistic  character  that  has  made  possible  this 
reaching  down  into  the  crushing  prospect  of  a  lifelong  im- 
prisonment to  draw  from  it  the  marvelous  phantasy  formation 
which  changed  Peter's  despair  and  loneliness  into  a  veritable 
heaven  of  love  and  bliss,  childhood  joy,  and  lovers'  constant 
meeting. 

Peter  Ibbetson  spent  his  boyhood  at  Passy,  a  charming  village 
retreat  near  Paris.  Here,  better  known  as  the  boy  Gogo  Pasquier, 
he  passed  his  childhood  days  with  his  father  and  mother  and 
his  small  friend  Mimsey,  who  with  her  mother  was  a  constant 
visitor  in  the  garden.  Here  she  and  Peter  learned  their  lessons 
and  played  the  happy  play  of  childhood.  The  death  of  Peter's 
parents  brought  him  into  the  care  of  a  so-called  uncle,  really 
a  cousin  of  Peter's  mother  in  England,  Colonel  Ibbetson,  a  hard 
and  unjust  as  well  as  a  sensual  man.  Peter,  bearing  his  rel- 
ative's family  name,  grew  to  manhood  here  separated  from  all 
those  he  had  known  in  the  happy  days  in  France  and  with  his 
heart  full  of  love  and  longing  for  them  and  of  bitterness  toward 
the  contemptuous  and  contemptible  cruelty  of  his  uncle's  manner 
toward  him.  He  enters  the  profession  of  an  architect  but  has 
little  confidence  in  his  own  success  although  his  prospects  are 
good  as  others  measure  his  ability.  He  himself  dreams  and  longs 
for  the  old  happy  days.  At  the  ball  with  which  the  play  opens 
he  meets  the  Duchess  of  Towers  whose  beauty  and  goodness 
are  on  every  tongue  and  he  and  she  are  stirred  to  a  vague  re- 
membrance which  later  becomes  a  distinct  recognition  of  each 
other  as  the  long  separated  friends  of  the  happy  Passy  days. 
The  recognition  takes  place  at  Passy  where  at  last  Peter  has 
escaped  for  a  brief  holiday.  He  returns  heartened  for  a  new 
and  more  forgiving  relationship  with  the  uncle,  but  his  good 
intentions  are  rudely  frustrated  by  being  confronted  by  the 
evidence  of  his  uncle's  infamy.  The  latter  had  plainly  and  ma- 
liciously intimated  that  Peter  was  his  own  son  and  adds 
to  his  perfidy  by  producing  a  letter  in  which  he  practically  but 
still  evasively  states  that  Peter's  mother,  held  by  her  son  in 
sainted  memory,  was  before  her  marriage  the  mistress  of  this 
cousin,  Colonel  Ibbetson.  Peter  cannot  restrain  himself.  Fired 


48  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

by  hideous  doubt  he  rushes  to  the  house  of  his  so-called  uncle 
and  demands  of  him  the  truth.  The  cowardly  wretch  still 
fences  from  the  truth,  only  goaded  at  the  last  to  utter  an  equiv- 
ocal avowal,  when  Peter  tortured  by  doubt  of  the  truth  or  falsity 
of  the  avowal  rushes  upon  him  and  slays  him  at  once  with  the 
heavy  stick  in  his  hand. 

Peter  is  at  once  apprehended  and  in  the  jail  meekly  prepares 
to  die.  At  the  moment  of  his  being  led  from  his  cell  however 
a  reprieve  is  brought  to  him  obtained  by  the  Duchess  of  Towers, 
who  also  sends  him  a  message  by  a  mutual  friend,  that  although 
her  own  marriage  an  unhappy  one  must  then  keep  her  from  him 
she  will  be  with  him  in  his  dreams,  and  she  instructs  him  how 
he  shall  "  dream  true.  " 

There  follow  then  forty  long  years  of  imprisonment  during 
which  the  gentleness  and  industry  of  the  prisoner  are  remarked 
by  all  about  him.  The  days  of  privation  and  toil  pass  for  him 
in  a  light  that  his  keepers  know  not  of.  He  lives  actually  only 
in  the  anticipation  of  the  dreams  of  the  night,  when  true  to  her 
word  the  duchess  moves  with  him  through  the  childhood  haunts 
and  through  all  the  dreamed  of  but  on  his  part  unseen  wonders 
of  the  world.  The  story  elaborates  these,  the  drama  confines 
itself  to  the  wanderings  in  the  old  garden  of  Passy  among  the 
parents  and  dear  friends  long  departed.  The  dreams  continue 
even  until  Mary  passes  out  of  them  in  one  dream  of  death  and 
until  Peter's  life  of  atonement  in  its  narrow  prison  is  over  and 
the  dream  melts  into  his  passing. 

The  drama  has  a  specialized  technical  interest  in  that  it  takes 
its  audience  into  the  inner  phantasy  of  a  Prison  Psychosis  and 
illuminates  the  content  of  such  a  pathological  formation.  This 
is  a  psychotic  formation  which  is  frequent  enough  among  those 
inmates  of  penal  institutions  or  the  hospitals  which  care  for 
their  sick,  and  much  labor  and  time  have  been  expended  upon 
its  possible  cause  and  meaning.  These  remained,  however,  ob- 
scure and  inexplicable  until  this  principle  of  defense  reaction 
against  an  inner  conflict  shed  its  interpretative  light.  This  ex- 
plains also  the  reason  for  its  frequency  and  its  common  oc- 
currence in  the  early  period  of  imprisonment.  This  has  already 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION   THROUGH    DREAMS  49 

been  noted  also  as  a  universal  mechanism,  guarding  humanity 
from  that  self  depreciation  and  discouragement  which  would 
surely  condition  further  failure.  It  assumes,  however,  all  too 
often,  pathological  proportions  as  it  separates  the  individual 
more  and  more  from  the  reality  which  he  would  gladly  deny  in 
the  face  of  his  inadequacy.  In  the  prison,  further  separated 
from  the  corrective  influences  of  active  life  and  social  com- 
parisons, the  pathology  becomes  uppermost.  And  still  there  is 
the  refuge  and  the  beauty  of  it  which  not  only  bring  back  the 
lost  peace  and  happiness,  but  make  of  the  otherwise  depressed 
prisoner  the  cheerful  worker,  whose  keepers  marvel  at  the  wil- 
ling accomplishment  of  his  tasks.  Such  a  faithful  inmate  Du 
Maurier  has  pictured  Peter.  The  drama  has  apparently  utilized 
as  its  chief  theme  such  happy  aspects  of  the  dreaming.  Yet 
we  believe  that  unconsciously  the  novelist  and  dramatist  have 
touched  also  the  deeper  theme  which  is  a  universal  one,  and  by 
thus  bridging  the  way  from  the  tragic  inner  conflict  to  this  its 
compromise  solution,  have  shown  us  how  much  or  how  little 
we  may  trust  such  a  solution,  how  far  it  holds  one  to  one's 
place  in  the  real  world,  and  how  far  it  forms  the  dangerous 
cutting  loose.  It  touches  the  inner  conflict  with  just  enough 
intuitive  understanding  to  quicken  each  auditor's  unconscious 
appreciation  of  it;  it  grants  him  then  both  warning  and  relief 
through  this  artistic  channel.  We  can  never  get  away  from  the 
fact  that  human  life  with  its  trial  and  error  consists  of  so 
much  compromise  adjustment  that  we  can  ask  for  nothing  more 
than  a  constantly  but  only  gradually  increasing  light  upon  the 
usefulness  or  danger  of  the  mechanisms  we  employ.  No  one 
can  set  himself  apart  in  a  class  of  complete  success,  for  all 
share  the  disabilities,  all  make  use  of  the  same  means  either 
to  evade  or  overcome  them.  We  all  seek  by  dream  to  com- 
pensate for  reality.  Therefore  these  artistic  creations  find  their 
greatest  value  in  teaching  us  how  to  dream  true  rather  than  to 
dream  false.  They  help  us  to  that  clearer  knowledge  of  what  it 
is  we  really  are  about  in  these  defense  reactions  and  so  deliver 
us  from  the  bondage  to  them  which  makes  of  them  an  end 
in  themselves  and  thus  a  more  complete  disguise  of  reality.  It 


5O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

leads  on,  therefore,  to  that  clearer  knowledge  of  our  inner  selves 
and  the  outer  projections  of  that  self,  which  means  more  per- 
fect health  in  actual  working  adjustment  to  the  things  of  the 
real  external  world. 

What,  therefore,  is  the  kernel  of  Peter's  problem,  the  con- 
flict and  the  phantastic  construction  which  finally  solved  his  prob- 
lem for  him  in  this  compromise  fashion?  For  the  prison  psy- 
chosis can  probably  no  more  be  separated  from  the  whole  of 
the  patient's  life  than  Peter's  later  dreams  with  their  pleasure 
giving  outcome  are  apart  from  the  earlier  dreams  and  doubts 
which  intermingled  themselves  to  his  undoing.  The  conflict 
seems  indeed  to  have  been  that  fundamental  one  which  lies  be- 
neath each  life  fabric.  Long,  long  ago  when  the  world  was 
still  very  young  man  apparently  groped  in  the  dark  with  the 
same  problem,  He  had  not  made  this  problem.  Evolution 
teaches  that  it  had  come  to  him  from  the  long  slow  ages  of 
building  before  man  arose,  when  life  was  learning  to  emerge, 
here,  there,  everywhere,  now  at  this  flashing  moment,  now  that, 
to  start  upon  an  individual  career.  Plant  and  animal  life  ex- 
perienced the  sudden  thrill  of  something  new  whenever  an 
individual  was  making  a  fresh  start  out  from  the  parental 
stream  of  immortality  which  had  felt  the  impetus  to  grant 
a  new  birth. 

The  parent  hold  of  this  greater  immortal  stream,  strengthen- 
ing and  intensifying  itself  as  time  went  on,  continued  to  exert 
a  powerful  influence  upon  the  life  it  had  brought  forth.  Its 
fullness,  the  security  and  peace  of  its  greater  stream,  glowed 
with  an  attraction  from  which  the  individual,  with  its  own 
forward  purpose  to  pursue,  only  reluctantly  and  partially  broke 
away.  And  still  his  incompleteness  of  separation  afforded  the 
individual  life  a  rich  share  of  the  greater,  fuller  life  behind,  of 
which  it  was  a  part,  even  while  it  pursued  its  solitary  way  of 
achievement  of  something  higher.  The  dawning  of  intellect  and 
consciousness  marked  the  rise  of  a  new  being  into  this  mystery 
of  ancient  dream  on  the  one  hand  and  individual  struggle  to 
rise  out  of  it  on  the  other.  His  ability  to  thinfc  and  reason 
gave  man  a  responsibility  toward  the  problem,  the  keenness 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION    THROUGH    DREAMS  5! 

of  which  had  no  place  when  only  feeling  and  impulse  were 
involved.  Man  first  began  to  face  the  problem  with  the  power 
of  interpretation  and  control.  It  was  the  problem  of  individual 
responsibility  and  effort  against  the  inertia  of  racial  security  and 
completeness. 

The  racial  child  of  long  ago  is  still  the  individual  child  of 
today.  His  perplexity,  deeply  grounded  in  the  feeling  and  im- 
pulse which  reach  far  behind  his  span  of  history,  is  still  con- 
sciously, intellectually  unsolved.  Each  individual  man  and 
woman  and  the  whole  race  together  are  still  in  a  life  and  death 
grapple  with  the  things  that  embrace  desire,  love  of  comfort 
and  ease,  and  the  outer  world  of  opportunity  which  summons 
the  creative  impulse.  The  parent  complex  those  psychiatrists 
call  it  who  have  sought  to  understand  and  guide  the  progressive 
urge  in  its  conflict  with  the  regressive  instinct  within.  Early 
man  in  his  simple  totemic  clan  set  himself  rigid  laws  for  its 
control.  Society  of  today  contemplates  with  the  greatest  horror 
any  flagrant  breach  of  the  biological  barrier  between  parent  and 
child,  the  marked  overstepping  of  the  separation  which  has 
grown  up  to  save  the  child  from  complete  return  to  the  parent 
love.  Yet  rigid  taboo  and  cultural  repression  have  not  wiped 
away  the  old  problem  nor  solved  the  conflict.  They  have  served 
rather  to  push  it  deeper  and  ever  deeper  into  the  soul  of  man. 
There  it  broods  as  an  unconscious  disturbance  constantly  active 
and  therefore  demanding  of  the  cultural  forces  of  consciousness 
ceaseless  vigilance  and  control.  Sometimes  the  solution  is  at- 
tained by  that  successful  adaptation  of  hidden  energy  to  these 
same  cultural  purposes  which  is  designated  useful  sublimation. 
Then  a  healthy  balance  is  maintained  and  life  is  free.  Often, 
more  often  than  we  know,  the  darkness  and  obscurity  of  the 
problem  form  a  menacing  influence  which  overthrows  the  peace 
and  effecttialness  of  the  life  and  the  cause  is  not  understood. 
Crime  itself  results,  as  with  the  hero  of  our  play,  and  further 
drifting  into  the  power  of  the  unconscious  follows  upon  this 
in  the  added  struggle  to  get  away  from  the  consequences  of 
the  misdeed.4* 

Whole  nations  have  cried  out  under  the  burden  of  this  life 
old  conflict,  and  such  tragedies  as  that  of  CEdipus  the  King 


52  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

have  become  the  national  tragic  theme.  Hamlet  vacillated  under 
it  until  he  destroyed  himself  and  all  his  house.  Brutus  slew 
Caesar,  his  probable  father.  It  established  the  "  Ordeal  "  through 
which  Richard  Feverel  wrecked  his  life  and  Lucy's  happiness. 
It  inspired  Du  Maurier  in  turn  to  set  Peter  Ibbetson  to  write 
his  autobiography  in  the  light  of  his  own  projected  defense, 
and  led  finally  to  the  dramatization  of  this  story  of  ill  success, 
tragic  failure,  and  refuge  in  dreams.  The  crowding  of  the 
theater  night  after  night  with  an  audience  tense  in  its  interest 
testified  to  the  appeal  of  this  play,  which  strikes  deep  in  the 
heart  of  man.  Probably  few  are  aware  of  the  real  note  of 
unison  with  which  this  hero's  story  awakens  response  in  each 
spectator.  No  one  in  fact  can  see  deeply  enough  and  clearly 
enough  into  this  ancient  darkness  to  understand  what  it  is  that 
has  stirred  him  so.  That  hesitating  restraint  which  has  marked 
comment  and  discussion  of  the  play  bears  witness  that  the  most 
profound  problem  has  been  touched.  The  complexity  of  the 
machinery  of  presentation,  with  the  skill  and  strength  and  sym- 
pathy that  one  has  felt  in  the  acting,  has  given  suitable  setting 
and  expression  to  the  ultimate  reality  of  the  drama  and  en- 
hances its  profound  mystery  and  truth. 

Ophelia's  cry  over  Hamlet  might  find  echo  in  the  ruin  of  a 
character  so  innately  noble  as  that  of  Peter.  Gogo,  the  boy, 
grown  to  manhood  in  Peter  Ibbetson,  gives  promise  of  all  that 
is  ideal,  lovable,  and  admirable.  One  thing,  however,  and  that 
the  one  thing  needful,  is  lacking  to  save  this  man  from  himself 
and  for  the  world.  The  great  purpose  of  life  which  surmounts 
all  difficulties,  because  its  glance  is  free  beyond  them  all,  is 
conspicuously  absent.  Social  diffidence,  business  mediocrity,  full 
employment  of  none  of  his  faculties  were  all  the  manifestations 
of  a  spirit  in  bondage.  Ability  even  to  tower  over  the  uncle's 
foppery  and  cowardly  licentiousness  reserves  itself  for  that  last 
supreme  act  of  passion,  which  cuts  him  off  finally  from  the 
world  of  real  men  and  women.  How  little  even  this  is  an  act 
of  freedom  from  inner  doubt  and  conflict  is  evidenced  by  the 
cry  in  the  face  of  the  uncle's  craven  lie,  "  Oh,  God !  what  shall 
I  believe !  My  mother !  " 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION   THROUGH   DREAMS  53 

Where  is  the  promise  of  the  lad  Gogo  at  play  with  Mimsey 
and  their  friends,  bending  over  Gray's  Elegy  or  spouting  for 
Mimsey  their  favorite  poem: 

"  All  day  thy  wings  have  fanned, 

At  that  far  height,  the  cold,  thin  atmosphere, 
Yet  stoop  not,  weary,  to  the  welcome  land, 
Though  the  dark  night  be  near." 

Why  did  he,  young  man  that  he  was,  rich  with  the  heritage 
of  his  birth  and  confronted  with  a  future  of  opportunity,  so 
soon  stop,  weary,  seeking  in  vain  for  the  "  summer  home  "  of 
rest?  The  message  which  as  a  happy  child  he  had  taken  from 
the  poem  had  failed  to  lead  him  "  through  .  .  .  rosy  depths  " 
to  pursue  the  solitary  way  of  progressive  achievement  where 
the  creative  soul  must  often  soar  alone.  He  had  not  read  aright. 
His  solitary  way  led  rather  back  into  the  dreams  of  the  past 
where  "  glow  the  heavens  with  the  last  steps  of  day." 

Du  Maurier  makes  Peter  himself  say,  "  Thus  did  I  pursue 
my  solitary  way  like  Bryant's  Waterfowl,  only  with  a  less  def- 
inite purpose  before  me."  And  again  Peter  says  of  the  wearying 
mental  uncertainty  which  causes  the  indecision  and  purpose- 
lessness  of  life,  "  Oh,  that  alternate  ebb  and  flow  of  the  spirits ! 
It  is  a  disease  and,  what  is  most  distressing,  it  is  no  real  change ; 
it  is  more  sickeningly  monotonous  than  absolute  stagnation  it- 
self. And  from  that  dreary  seesaw  I  could  never  escape,  except 
through  the  gates  of  dreamless  sleep,  the  death  in  life.  .  .  ." 
Even  the  dreams  at  that  time,  before  the  deed  of  murder,  he 
dared  not  admit,  but  they  must  lie  in  that  apparent  "  dream- 
lessness,"  where  the  unconscious  phantasies  are  enacted  far  be- 
low the  regard  of  consciousness.  It  is  no  wonder  that  he  dares 
know  that  he  dreams  only  when  the  stronger  woman  has  taught 
him  some  service  of  the  dream. 

Frail  little  Mimsey's  life  force  had  found  a  better  way  for 
her.  She  as  Mary  the  Duchess  of  Towers,  the  successful,  strong 
woman,  unlimited  in  her  service  to  her  fellowmen,  must  needs 
be  the  support  and  guide  of  her  one  time  protector  and  willing 
slave.  Thus  say  the  dreams,  recognizing  in  her  the  success 
and  strength  which  the  dreamer  himself  had  missed.  She  had 


54  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

grown  free  of  the  garden  loveliness  and  peace.  Only  at  the 
end  of  a  busy  day  in  the  brief  time  she  could  steal  from  waking 
life's  active  duties  could  she  return  to  the  heart's  desire.  In 
this  she  knew1  the  secret  of  "  dreaming  true."  Poor  Peter 
emerged  from  the  garden  home  in  a  bondage  more  fettering 
than  poverty,  absence  of  friends,  or  the  unsympathetic  scorn 
of  a  heartless  uncle  could  ever  impose  upon  him. 

The  invisible  web  which  has  entangled  so  many  a  life  in 
the  unsuspecting  years  of  childhood  had  bound  him  fast.  The 
very  shelter  and  sweetness  of  the  idyllic  home,  the  tender  love 
of  father  and  mother  and  admiring  friends  imprinted  upon  these 
early  impressionable  years  the  weakness  from  which  he  was 
never  afterward  to  escape.  It  strengthened  that  fixation  in  the 
old  problematic  strife  between  the  love  which  finds  all  its  satis- 
faction in  dependence  upon  the  past  and  that  freedom  which 
finds  its  salvation  out  in  the  world.  The  very  precipitation  of 
that  unconscious  struggle  into  such  a  fixed  snare  to  the  libido 
reveals  its  cause  in  the  dream  which  in  the  drama  just  precedes 
Peter's  projection  of  the  whole  struggle  out  into  the  murder  of 
the  uncle.  It  occurs  at  Passy  on  the  occasion  when  he  and  the 
Duchess  become  fully  known  to  each  other,  while  he  sleeps  just 
before  her  entrance.  Long  before  this  Peter  had  confided  to 
Mrs.  Deane  that  the  first  drop  of  hatred  had  been  distilled  into 
him  from  the  way  in  which  the  uncle  had  spoken  of  the  Major, 
an  old  friend  of  boyhood,  when  the  uncle  came  to  fetch  the  boy 
Gogo  away.  "  I  hate  him ;  I  think  he  hates  me/'  Peter  had 
sought  to  justify  himself  at  that  interview  with  Mrs.  Deane. 
The  dream  at  Passy  on  the  hot  Sunday  aftenoon  tells  a  different 
tale.  It  reveals  a  rising  something  in  the  child's  mind  much 
earlier  than  that  which  crystallized  then  into  the  bitter  poison 
of  suspicion.  The  boy  Gogo  sits  at  his  translation  under  the 
trees.  He  appears  utterly  absorbed  in  childish  struggle  with 
the  difficulties  of  his  task.  He  must  finish  putting  into  French, 
"  And  leaves  the  world  to  darkness  and  to  me."  Just  here 
the  uncle  enters  and  holds  interview  with  the  mother.  Gogo, 
flushed  and  engrossed  with  the  arduousness  of  the  translation, 
apparently  does  not  hear.  Suddenly  he  looks  up  more  than 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION   THROUGH   DREAMS  55 

startled.  He  seems  to  have  an  unconscious  intuition  or  per- 
ception of  the  turn  the  conversation  is  taking.  It  has  not  yet 
needed  the  uncle's  sneering  reference  to  the  possible  jealousy  on 
the  part  of  the  husband  or  his  mother's  sudden  cry  to  Gogo  to 
go  find  his  father,  to  attract  the  boy's  frightened  attention.  He 
is  up  and  alert  before  the  fatal  word  "  jealousy "  is  uttered. 
That  only  fixes  the  doubt  which  has  arisen  from  a  flash  of 
self  revelation  that  has  entered  his  soul. 

Those  familiar  with  the  vagaries  of  the  unconscious  phantasies, 
as  they  group  themselves  about  the  central  complex  with  an 
absolute  disregard  for  the  sequence  of  conscious  logic  or  time, 
will  be  ready  to  accede  to  this  phantasy  picture  its  possible 
place  merely  in  the  later  psychosis  erected  by  Peter  both  before 
and  after  the  deed  and  transferred  in  his  defense  to  this  earlier 
period  to  account  for  the  closely  following  murder.  The  pic- 
turing of  the  play  makes  this  dream  vision  a  curious  turning 
point  upon  which  Peter  decides  to  return  to  the  uncle,  lay 
aside  his  long  animosity,  and  enter  upon  relations  of  friendship 
and  peace.  Is  this  a  palliative  resolve  against  the  suspicion  at 
work  in  the  dream? 

The  resolve  is  rudely  shattered,  however,  by  the  uncle  him- 
self. The  letter  which  comes  into  Peter's  hands  and  his  uncle's 
subsequent  conduct  precipitate  instead  the  violent  murder,  never- 
theless not  without  cry  of  doubt  and  despair  before  the  blow 
finally  is  given.  Once  the  deed  is  committed,  Peter  seems  to 
have  attained  a  new  sense  of  freedom.  There  are  throughout 
the  psychotic  dreams  which  present  themselves  through  the  long 
term  of  years  no  longer  such  scenes  as  those  in  which  the  boy 
Gogo  participated  in  the  previous  dream.  All  is  sweet  and 
fair  and  desirable.  There  is  even  the  separation  of  the  child 
from  the  mother  through  the  woman  in  the  dreams,  who  now 
becomes  leader  and  guide  and  sympathetic  friend.  After  the 
first  call  of  loneliness  and  need  toward  the  mother  who  does  not 
hear,  Peter  wanders  satisfied  with  the  woman  Mary,  the  normal, 
adult  object  of  love,  who  at  last,  though  only  in  the  dream, 
has  rightfully  taken  the  mother's  place.  Even  at  death  the 
greeting  with  the  mother  turns  quickly  to  a  revival  of  the  dream 
existence  with  Mary. 


56  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

It  is  as  if  Peter  attained  freedom  at  last  when  the  murder 
had  been  committed,  the  freedom  he  had  never  in  his  unim- 
prisoned  days  been  able  to  find.  But,  alas,  it  is  now  only  in 
the  dream,  the  psychosis,  when  he  can  no  longer  make  it  of 
service  to  the  world  in  which  he  should  have  lived.  He  has 
bought  his  inner  freedom  at  the  price  of  his  place  out  there; 
nevertheless  he  has  killed  the  dark  thing  within  himself.  This 
not  unusual  dramatic  issue  has  its  correspondence  in  the  dreams 
of  the  neurotic  patient.  Here  it  is  often  discovered  there  will 
be  a  number  of  attempts  to  slay  the  fixation  in  terms  of  the 
death  of  the  unconsciously  loved  object.  Freedom  from  the 
neurotic  fixation  is  marked  by  the  final  accomplishment  of  this 
in  the  dream.  The  yielding  of  even  the  child  to  the  inner  un- 
conscious attraction  of  dependence  upon  the  mother,  and  grati- 
fication within  that  love,  had  led  Peter  all  these  years  in  the 
opposite  direction  from  life.  It  had  held  him  hesitating,  timid, 
afraid,  pursuing  his  solitary  way  in  dreams  of  his  own  making. 
It  led  him  finally  into  the  agony  of  doubt  and  horror  and  pain 
to  the  point  where  he  actually  faced  the  darker  side  of  this 
mother  worship,  the  side  which  is  death  to  the  creative  life  and 
against  which  all  nature  and  nature's  laws  have  set  their  flaming 
sword. 

The  unbearableness  of  this  darker  side  to  conscious  recog- 
nition must  fling  it  outside  himself.  As  with  Hamlet,  there 
is  an  uncle  at  hand.  Let  the  guilt  and  shame  be  upon  him 
through  his  shameless  torture  of  the  young  man  as  through 
his  cowardly  accusations  of  the  woman  involved.  Hamlet,  too 
distraught  with  his  own  doubts  and  fears,  could  not  bring 
himself  to  the  deed  of  retribution.  Peter,  slaying  his  uncle  in 
a  storm  of  contempt  and  anger,  frees  himself  from  the  horror 
within  himself.  Now  he  can  laugh  in  the  face  of  death.  There 
is  no  repentance  for  the  thing  he  has  done.  Freedom  to  go  and 
come  is  lost,  but  peace  within  himself  is  attained.  Henceforth 
he  will  live  only  in  his  dreams,  but  he  has  learned  how  to  "  dream 
true."  He  calls  it  dreaming  true,  because  the  conflict  is  now 
wiped  out  of  his  life.  It  grants  him  forty  years  of  peace 
and  happiness  in  which  he  faithfully  fulfills  the  limited 
prison  tasks.  That  is  all.  He  has  paid  a  price  for  this,  the 


PHANTASY   COMPENSATION   THROUGH    DREAMS  57 

price  of  complete  withdrawal  from  the  greater  sphere  of  ac- 
tivity, where  creative  achievement  had  awaited  him.  It  is  in 
reality  the  price  of  his  childish  fixation  for  wihich  he  had 
given  in  part  his  earlier  ineffectual  years  but  which  has  now 
demanded  full  payment.  Was  this  price  first  set  upon  him  by 
the  too  loving  parents  who  made  of  the  garden  home  so  dream- 
like an  existence  that  the  child  could  never  break  away?  Had 
a  too  sheltering  tenderness  established  the  fixation  upon  the 
mother  so  strong  that  it  formed  an  indissoluble  bond  which 
had  fettered  his  whole  life?  It  is  dissolved  by  this  act,  which 
was  the  culmination  of  the  "  bitter  drop  "  instilled  within  the 
mother  love.  It  barred  him  forever  from  that  happiness  which 
lies  in  the  world,  where  one  attains  it  by  freedom  both  to  love 
and  to  work.  It  substitutes  for  this  only  the  goal  of  dreams 
and  finally  "  the  abyss  of  heaven,"  the  "  zone  to  zone "  of  the 
"  boundless  sky,"  to  which  the  dreams  finally  converge. 

Herein  lies  the  lesson  of  understanding  for  all  who  witness 
this  play.  Here  also  is  the  value  for  a  therapeutic  understanding 
of  the  reason  for  the  form  and  content  of  the  psychosis  of 
self  defense  and  substitution.  This  offers  not  only  a  way  of 
approach  into  the  clinical  appreciation  and  treatment  of  such 
individuals  who  have  thus  separated  themselves  from  actual 
affairs.  It  brings  also  a  new  measure  of  prophylaxis  which 
must  have  the  widest  social  bearings  upon  the  underlying  mean- 
ing and  hidden  purpose  of  crime.  It  must  work,  moreover, 
through  each  individual  life  as  society  comes  more  clearly  to 
appreciate  the  source  and  reason  for  such  a  result  of  the  inner 
conflict,  which  in  some  finds  expression  in  criminal  conduct. 
These  are  known  through  the  mechanisms  also  which  grow  up 
later,  as  in  the  psychosis,  as  a  means  of  defense  against  the  un- 
bearable recognition  of  the  inner  conscious  content  and  the 
conflict  which  this  conditions.  The  prophylaxis,  however,  reaches 
still  further,  touching  the  lives  of  the  children.  It  calls  sharply 
to  those  who  have  the  task  of  thrusting  them  out  to  face 
the  sterner  things,  hard  enough;  for  the  adult  himself,  still 
harder  for  him  to  choose  for  the  .child. 

Dream  is  not  denied  us  by  the  reality  in  which  we  live.  The 
latter  realizes  its  own  true  worth,  builds  and  strives  toward 


58  PSYCHOANALYSIS    AND    THE    DRAMA 

its  ideal  because  the  never  failing  glow  of  the  dream  life  can- 
not be  obliterated.  Dream  life  nevertheless  spends  itself  to 
its  own  enjoyment  and  reaches  bewilderment  when  it  turns  its 
attention  only  upon  itself.  It  gropes  confused  in  insatiable 
desire,  unsatisfied  yet  cloying  with  the  satiety  of  its  end- 
less phantasies.  Really  it  is  only  through  healthful  action 
that  one  learns  to  "  dream  true."  The  constant  alternation 
between  wholesome,  useful  activity  which  delights  in  the  diffi- 
culties as  well  as  the  rewards  of  the  outside  world,  and  the  deep, 
silent  life  of  pleasure  within,  gives  life  its  precious  worth.  This 
makes  it  deep  and  true  in  the  heart  of  things,  but  keeps  it  at 
the  same  time  always  rebounding  toward  the  height  of  achieve- 
ment, even  shifting  this  height  with  the  growing  outlook  which 
action  must  continually  prepare  for  itself.  Such  dreaming  true 
fans  indeed  "that  far  height,  the  cold,  thin  atmosphere,"  but 
this  is  not  coldly  and  harshly  to  reject  "  the  summer  home  where 
reeds  shall  bend,  soon  o'er  thy  sheltered  nest."  It  merely  sets 
the  true  limited  value  on  the  havens  of  rest  and  pleasure,  lim- 
ited so  that  they  shall  not  prove  a  snare.  That  solitary  way 
loses  itself  neither  in  heaven  nor  on  earth,  but  knows  them 
both  in  the  true  dreams  that  live. 

It  is  such  dreaming  which  lies  in  the  very  art  of  the  playhouse. 
To  such  a  spirit  of  dreams  it  leads  its  audience,  so  that  they 
find  veiled  beneath  its  artistic  forms  the  reality  of  human  strug- 
gle, its  source,  and  the  success  or  failure  of  its  solution.  There  is 
a  clear  intellectual  gain  in  the  presentation  of  these  human  re- 
actions and  efforts  at  adjustment  and  a  fresh  insight  into  certain 
definite  social  problems.  For  these  are  interpreted  in  the  lan- 
guage of  the  energy  which  strives  beneath  the  tragedies  of  life 
and  the  emotion  which  gives  life  its  individual  value  and  setting. 
Actual  psychoses  are  set  in  a  new  and  truer  light  through  this 
rich  and  varied  coloring.  They  take  their  place  in  the  one  great 
drama  of  human  effort  and  compromise  success.  All  problems 
of  health  and  disease  find  also  a  new  significance  in  such  a 
conception.  For  practical  clinical  affairs  find  their  place  also 
among  human  dreams.  The  art  of  the  drama  finds  and  points 
the  way  between  the  false  dreams  and  the  true. 


CHAPTER    V 
ALCOHOLISM  AND  THE  PHANTASY  LiFE1 

The  pathway  into  the  attainment  of  dream  satisfaction  as 
a  substitute  for  reality  may  not  depend,  as  it  did  with  Peter 
Ibbetson,  on  a  suddenly  complete  severance  of  the  right  to  re- 
main among  men.  The  unconscious  may  choose  less  violent  and 
more  protracted  ways  to  release  the  individual  from  adjustment 
and  responsibility.  Alcohol  may  prove  in  its  particular  effects 
upon  the  individual  such  a  means  and  the  pathway  of  alcoholic 
indulgence  be  chosen  and  followed  in  order  to  obtain  the  same 
unconscious  ends. 

There  are  two  things  which  mark  the  complete  success  of 
man:  his  capacity  for  adapting  himself  to  the  demands  of  ex- 
ternal life  and  that  for  living  out  satisfactorily  his  own  inner  self. 
In  these  is  to  be  found  the  measure  of  health  within  himself, 
individually,  and  without  himself,  that  is  in  his  full  moral  re- 
lationship to  society. 

Whether  he  is  aware  of  this  or  not,  he  is  continually  ex- 
pressing his  ability  or  disability  to  live  out  healthily  his  own 
personal  relationships,  such  as  those  of  love  and  friendship, 
and  in  expressing  himself  in  the  social  ways  of  activity,  which 
are  equally,  but  more  broadly,  creative.  These  are  the  advance 
posts  which  he  must  reach  as  he  attains  the  high  tide  of  success 
and  health,  or  they  only  mark  the  degree  of  his  failure  and 
sickness.  He  naturally  presses  these  boundaries  forward  with 
his  growth  and  prepares  for  himself  in  this  way  a  fuller  ex- 
ercise of  his  powers,  thus  providing  for  the  increasing  demands 
which  alone  can  express  his  enlarging  capacities  and  his  ever 
increasing  need  for  this  self  expansion  and  self  expression. 
This  must  be  so  in  his  more  personal  relationships,  and  then 

1  Printed  in  the  New  York  Medical  Journal,  Jan.  18,  1919.  Leo  Tol- 
stoi ;  Redemption.  Boni  and  Liveright,  New  York,  1919. 

59 


6O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

also  as  his  individual  relationships  stimulate  him  toward  a  more 
complete  socialized  creative  life,  in  which  his  individual  capaci- 
ties find  this  wider  exercise. 

More  briefly  stated,  each  individual  in  order  to  be  satisfied  and 
well  must  be  adult,  that  is  full  grown  up  to  each  fresh  point 
of  departure  into  experience  and  continually  passing  on  through 
full  use  of  the  capacities  he  has  into  wider  ones.  Anything 
less  than  this  is  temptation  to  idleness  and  ease.  It  is  failure 
to  gather  all  the  force  to  each  point  of  development  and  use  it 
there  and  it  results  only  in  deterioration  and  continuous  loss 
rather  than  gain  and  satisfaction.  Yet  at  the  same  time  such 
is  the  pleasure  reward  which  acts  as  a  premium  upon  every 
effort  toward  attainment,  and  upon  every  forward  step  in  prog- 
ress and  use,  that  each  one  of  these  pleasures  forms  too  easily 
a  satisfaction  in  itself  and  the  individual  is  tempted  to  remain 
at  any  stage  in  the  path  of  progress,  sexual  or  social.  Then 
the  phantasied  enjoyment  easily  weaves  its  spell  around  him 
and  reality  recedes  and  fails  in  its  stimulating  attractiveness, 
while  the  unreal,  the  phantasy  surrounded,  partial  attainment 
appears  sufficient  in  itself  and  for  the  time  altogether  entrancing. 
Because  it  is  unreal,  therefore  not  enduring,  it  must  frequently 
show  its  unreliability  and  finally  end  in  bitter  dissatisfaction. 
But  phantasy  in  defense  multiplies  itself  and  also  resorts  more 
and  more  hectically  to  artificial  means  to  stimulate  itself  and 
cover  over  more  and  more  thickly  and  completely  its  empty 
nothingness.  It  has  itself  magnified  the  difficulties  of  reality 
by  distorting  them  through  a  wrongful  interpretation  of  itself 
no  less  than  of  the  reality  it  opposes  and  so  it  makes  the  way 
out  of  dangerous  phantasy  continually  harder,  and  the  way 
deeper  into  its  meshes  continually  easier.  It  luxuriously  paves 
the  broad  road  to  destruction. 

It  is  not,  however,  a  wilful  and  depraved  determination  which 
starts  one  upon  this  road.  Weakness  and  failure  are  not  so 
abruptly  nor  so  simply  conditioned.  Rather  such  a  course  dis- 
covered as  it  is  by  the  world,  even,  by  the  physician,  only  when 
already  far  along,  has  its  determinants  more  or  less  all  along 
the  way  where  phantasy  has  succeeded  in  wresting  the  attention 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE  PHANTASY  LIFE  6l 

from  reality  and  building  up  its  own  power  instead.  It  is  a 
lifelong  story  beginning  regularly  in  childhood,  when  the  way 
of  progress  and  complete  mental  health  has  not  been  found, 
but  instead  these  deviations  from  that  road  have  been  discov- 
ered and  one  by  one  their  attractions  have  been  allowed  subtly 
to  multiply  and  fasten  themselves  upon  the  victim. 

It  must  still  be  remembered  that  these  bypaths  are  not  how- 
ever through  foreign  country  into  which  some  exceptionally  un- 
fortunate persons  wander.  They  are  those  in  which  all  linger 
for  a  time  in  the  process  of  growth,  but  some  also  soon  pass  be- 
yond in  development  toward  the  full  and  healthy  adult  life.  It  is 
here  in  such  natural  territory  that  phantasy  does  its  work,  dis- 
torting the  prospective  look  and  preventing  the  free  stepping 
forth  on  the  forward  path. 

"  Redemption,"  the  dramatization  of  Tolstoi's  story,  has  also 
its  own  peculiar  fitness  for  drawing  the  veil  gently  from  this 
j  darker  side  of  the  losing  inner  conflict.  It  leads  the  spectators 
on  from  a  mere  legitimate  return  to  the  inner  life  of  phantasy 
to  its  abuse  and  exaggeration  of  influence  upon  the  individual. 
It  enables  them  to  enter  at  first  sympathetically  into  the  fairer 
glow  of  the  phantasy  which  forms  too  effectual  a  bar  to  the 
hero's  return  to  the  world  of  real  deeds  and  achievement,  and 
holds  him  there  until  the  roseate  mirage  has  proved  itself  sordid, 
unsatisfying,  deathly.  Meanwhile  by  a  keen  penetration  it  has 
!laid  bare  some  of  the  falsifying  mechanism  of  the  phantasy 
and  revealed  the  deeper  causes  of  the  failure  and  psychic  sick- 
ness and  degradation. 

Fedya  has  deserted  a  wife  who  loves  him  though  the  desertion 
has  no  apparent  external  motives.  The  attempt  of  her  family 
to  explain  it  upon  the  attraction  of  the  gypsy  character  with 
whom  he  is  often  found  or  in  the  lure  of  the  low  surroundings 
in  which  he  indulges  appears  at  once  quite  unconvincing.  Deep- 
er reasons  lie  within  the  man's  own  conflict  as  he  himself  ac- 
knowledges to  the  one  or  two  truly  sympathetic  listeners  who 
;can  understand  him.  These  conflicts  and  the  losing  struggle 
with  them  which  marks  Fedya's  career  form  the  theme  of  the 
play.  No  entreaties  on  the  part  of  the  wife  prevail  to  lead 


62  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

him  to  return  to  her,  his  life  with  her  being  because  of  his 
inner  difficulties  impossible  to  him.  Yet  his  respect  and  sincere 
regard  for  her  happiness  create  the  desire  to  remove  the  hin- 
drance of  his  presence  so  that  she  shall  be  free  to  marry  another 
man  who  loves  her  and  can  make  her  life  a  happy  one. 

Fedya  has  not  the  courage  to  shoot  himself  and  he  has  too 
much  high  feeling  to  drag  himself  through  the  degradation 
necessary  to  give  her  grounds  for  divorce.  So  he  accepts  the 
clever  scheme  of  the  gypsy  girl  who  loves  him  and  befriends 
him  to  pretend  that  he  has  been  drowned  and  therefore  can  no 
longer  prove  an  obstacle  because  of  his  wife's  scruples.  This 
plan  is  successfully  carried  out  but  after  his  former  wife  has 
passed  some  years  of  happy  married  life  with  her  second  hus- 
band, Fedya  unwittingly  reveals  himself  and  the  marriage  is 
subjected  to  the  rigors  of  legal  trial  and  condemnation.  Then 
at  last  the  courage  of  the  man,  though  now  to  all  external  ap- 
pearance utterly  ruined  and  degraded,  asserts  itself  and  he  does 
actually  remove  himself  by  taking  his  own  life. 

After  the  first  scene,  in  which  the  hero's  defection  from  the 
paths  of  rectitude  has  been  briefly  stated  for  the  audience,  the 
real  play  opens  upon  this  phantasy  world.  Even  before  this 
second  rise  of  the  curtain  the  simple  beauty  and  charm  of 
phantasy  makes  its  appeal.  This  is  first  to  the  sense  of 
hearing,  that  sense  through  which,  as  Wagner  has  said,  the 
artist  reveals  most  deeply  and  most  truly  the  inner  nature  of 
things.  The  simple  strains  of  the  orchestra  with  the  subdued 
voices  of  the  singers  upon  the  stage  prepares  us  for  the  added 
fascination  of  the  low  gypsy  room  with  its  strange  dark  figures, 
their  wild  spontaneous  yet  suppressed  breaking  forth  into  song 
or  dance  or  whatever  is  suited  to  please  the  mood  of  the  hour. 
The  red  glow  of  the  fire  upon  the  picturesque  figures  with  the 
occasional  brightness  of  garment  or  ornament  upon  the  women 
fill  in  the  enchantment  of  the  picture.  The  central  figure  of 
the  play  reclines  in  the  more  mellowed  glow  of  the  spot  light 
under  the  full  spell  of  pleasure  and  indolent  enjoyment  of  all 
this  sensuous  and  phantastic  setting.  It  is  he  in  whom  is  to 
be  witnessed  the  effect  upon  a  human  soul  of  such  a  complete 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE   PHANTASY  LIFE  63 

weaving  and  thralldom  of  the  spell  of  unreality  as  he  descends 
into  its  power  more  completely. 

The  music  grows  more  abandoned  but  plaintively  appealing 
as  it  takes  possession  of  the  entire  scene  which  seems  to  have 
attracted  and  lured  him  from  his  home.  It  is  not  however 
strictly  that.  It  is  not  the  spell  of  this  gypsy  room  sunken 
below  the  street  or  the  cold  blue  light  which  shines  from  without 
against  the  window  panes  at  the  top  of  the  room.  It  is  not 
the  warm  sensuous  brightness,  which  contrasts  even  more  hu- 
manly with  the  outside  coldness,  in  the  warmer  radiance  of 
the  fond  creature  hovering  passionately  near  him,  her  bright  colors 
and  cheap  flashing  ornament  more  in  evidence  in  the  brighter 
light  where  Fedya,  the  sunken  man,  lies  drinking  and  smoking 
and  dreaming.  It  is  here  that  his  friend,  the  devoted  messenger 
from  his  wife,  seeks  him  and  implores  him  for  her  sake  to 
return  to  her  and  the  realities  of  life.  The  appeal  is  vain. 
It  is  met  only  by  mocking  indifference  with  a  certain  insolent 
disdain  which  is  partly  bravado,  partly  drunken  helplessness 
to  break  the  chains  of  fascination  which  hold  him  in  this  other, 
this  unreal  world. 

For  this  is  what  he,  this  drunkard,  has  chosen.  Rather  this 
is  what  it  is  to  be  a  drunkard.  For  some  reason  he  has  drifted 
from  the  path  which  would  have  proved  him  a  man  with  a 
man's  power  to  win  and  enjoy  life  in  all  the  fullness  with  which 
earlier  opportunities  presented  themselves  to  him.  For  some 
strange  and  hidden  reason  he  has  been  caught  in  this  outer 
fringe  of  pleasure  which  looks  so  fair  if  not  gazed  upon  too 
long  or  too  closely,  but  which  even  here  ends  only  in  the  luxury 
of  dream  and  selfish  phantasy  with  no  access  to  anything  lasting 
and  substantial. 

This  is  the  drunkard's  paradise,  the  refuge  which  alcohol 
gives  from  something  in  reality  which  fails  for  some  reason 
to  maintain  its  better  and  higher  claims  upon  him.  He  has 
chosen  the  route  of  alcohol,  not  because  of  its  taste,  not  by 
the  craving  for  the  thing  in  itself,  the  basis  on  which  the  world 
has  blindly  sought  to  explain  and  counteract  its  influence,  but 
as  a  means  of  easy  entry  into  the  world  of  phantasy,  and  has 


64  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

allowed  it  to  release  the  higher  conscious  control  of  reason  and 
grant  admittance  to  the  easier  retrogressive  paths.  Fedya  later 
explains  this  to  the  wise  and  thoughtful  prince,  who  alone  holds 
out  a  hand  of  understanding  sympathy,  of  comprehension  of 
the  fact  that  to  the  drunkard's  life  there  is  an  inner  history 
of  conflict,  who  perceives  that  there  is  a  reason  for  his  con- 
duct and  the  state  into  which  he  has  fallen  which  deserves 
attention  and  consideration  as  an  actual  psychical  fact.  "  I've 
led  this  sort  of  life  for  ten  years  and  you're  the  first  real  person 
to  show  me  sympathy.  .  .  .  Ah,  yes,  my  ruin.  Well,  first 
drink,  not  because  it  tasted  well,  but  because  everything  I  did 
disappointed  me  so,  made  me  so  ashamed  of  myself.  I  feel 
ashamed  now,  while  I  talk  to  you.  Whenever  I  drank,  shame 
was  drowned  in  the  first  glass,  and  sadness.  Then  music,  not 
opera  or  Beethoven,  but  gypsy  music;  the  passion  of  it  poured 
energy  into  me,  while  those  dark  bewitching  eyes  looked  into 
the  bottom  of  my  soul.  And  the  more  alluring  it  all  was,  the 
more  shame  I  felt  afterwards." 

So  far  however  this  is  still  looking  upon  the  more  external 
revelation  of  his  conflict.  This  is  no  deeper  than  a  superficial 
realization  of  its  existence  as  a  psychic  struggle.  Its  inner  mean- 
ing and  the  elements  which  have  first  initiated  it  and  have  given 
it  its  peculiar  trend,  the  dark  things  beneath  it,  from  which 
temporary  refuge  is  found  in  these  particular  paths  of  self 
indulgence,  are  yet  matters  of  deeper  study.  At  first  the  authors 
and  the  actors  allow  to  play  upon  their  audience  the  same  spell 
of  attraction  which  proves  the  phantasy  world  a  delight  to  all, 
and  not  at  first  an  unnatural  evil  in  itself.  Then  by  artistic 
gradations  those  who  witness  the  drama  are  introduced  into 
the  exaggeration  of  its  hold  upon  the  human  psyche,  its  wrong- 
ful use  to  pull  away  from  the  paths  of  salvation  in  reality  to 
the  ultimate  ruin,  which  is  its  regressive  goal. 

It  is  indeed  soon  to  be  seen  even  through  the  first  glamour 
of  the  play  that  already  there  is  at  work  an  unreality  substi- 
tuting itself  for  ability  wholesomely  to  receive  and  enjoy.  There 
is  something  thus  unnatural  and  incomplete  even  in  the  response 
which  Fedya  makes  or  fails  to  make  to  the  advances  of  the  gypsy 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE   PHANTASY  LIFE  65 

girl,  who  as  time  goes  on  reveals  herself  sincere  and  genuine 
in  her  devotion  to  him.  He  is  unable  to  return  her  love  in 
kind.  Here  once  more  it  is  not  the  moral  aversion  he  admits 
to  sullying  the  purity  of  this  girl's  love  for  him  which  makes 
him  so  half  responsive  to  her  love.  This  is  no  doubt  a  factor 
in  his  behavior  to  her,  particularly  later,  as  he  explains  in  the 
last  scene  when  he  is  describing  their  happy  hours  together 
after  she  has  saved  him  from  the  suicide  he  had  planned. 

At  that  time,  as  the  play  proceeds,  he  had  planned  to  take 
his  life  in  order  to  release  his  wife,  so  that  she  might  be  free 
to  marry  a  man  more  worthy  of  her,  the  same  friend  who 
appeared  in  the  gypsy  resort  to  lead  him  home.  He  had  chosen 
this  course  rather  than  that  of  a  divorce  because  of  the  sordid 
and  filthy  lying  details  of  the  ordinary  legal  course  of  procedure. 
There  was  too  much  good,  too  much  real  nobility  of  character 
striving  against  weakness  to  permit  that.  Yet  characteristically 
too  his  courage  had  failed  him.  Then  when  he  was  in  despair 
the  gypsy  girl  had  appeared  and  in  the  strength  of  her  love 
and  power  to  control  affairs  she  had  proposed  a  feigned  death 
that  he  might  free  his  wife  and  friend  from  the  barrier  of 
their  moral  scruples,  leaving  them  to  their  happiness  as  he 
would  be  free  to  follow  his  own  course.  This  he  rehearses 
in  the  last  act,  when,  some  years  later  and  many  stages  lower 
in  his  degradation,  he  relates  his  strange  life  to  a  sympathetic 
companion  at  a  drinking  den  in  the  city  slums. 

Even  then  he  admits  that  not  alone  was  it  a  moral  ideality 
and  unselfishness  that  had  kept  him  from  debasing  the  gypsy 
girl  sexually,  this  girl  who  had  so  pleaded  for  his  love  and 
thrown  herself  upon  him.  He  had  in  fact  revived  his  original 
sense  of  honor  and  highmindedness,  that  higher  standard  of 
character  which  is  so  at  variance  with  the  weaknesses  and  self- 
ish tendencies  which  are  revealed  in  the  search  into  unconscious 
motives  and  causes  for  sickness  and  failure.  It  is  this  double 
character  that  is  in  one  sense  the  cause  of  any  neurotic  com- 
promise. The  strife  between  the  two  attitudes  and  trends  causes 
the  conflict  and  suffering  which  are  felt  as  illness  and  mental 
distress  and  weakness  with  its  attendant  shame.  On  the  one 


66  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

hand  it  reveals  that  the  better  nature  will  not  fall  easily  into 
the  paths  of  sheer  self  indulgence  and  base  gratification,  on  the 
other  that  the  better  nature  has  not  obtained  sufficient  control 
of  the  unconscious  with  its  buried  impulses  to  direct  them  to 
ways  of  health  and  strength.  Such  evidences  of  conflict,  of 
the  presence  and  force  of  two  sets  of  desire  and  tendency,  are 
evident  all  along  the  way  in  the  character  of  Fedya.  It  is  this 
which  excites  interest  and  sympathy.  Through  this  there  is 
here  such  a  true  representation  of  the  average  human  life  that 
the  spectator  is  compelled  to  a  fellow  feeling,  whether  he  ac- 
knowledges it  or  not.  The  special  pathological  form  therefore 
in  which  it  appears  in  the  character  of  Fedya  is  only  an  ex- 
aggeration of  such  a  struggle  in  degrees  which  make  it  path- 
ological and  which  also  drive  the  sufferer  to  the  aid  of  alcohol 
to  make  the  conflict  easier,  to  efface  it  for  the  time  by  inhibiting 
the  higher  control  which  sets  one  side  of  the  struggle. 

Fedya  knows  something  of  these  two  sides  of  his  nature.  His 
friends  are  not  unacquainted  with  the  higher  cultural  side  with 
its  ideals  and  semblances  of  restraint.  They  have  seen  it  in 
the  better  days  and  when  he  first  slipped  along  his  regressive 
path.  The  other  side,  in  which  lie  the  reasons  for  weakness 
and  failure,  they  do  not  know,  but  he  himself  feels  them  and 
can  in  part  lay  them  bare.  We  hear  this  as  he  tells  the  story 
first  of  his  treatment  of  the  gypsy  girl.  "  I  felt  it  wasn't  right 
to  go  on  taking,  taking  where  I  couldn't  give.  I  told  her  we'd 
have  to  say  goodbye.  My  heart  was  so  wrung  all  the  time 
that  I  could  hardly  help  crying." 

"  The  single  good  act  of  my  soul  was  not  ruining  that  girl. 
Was  it  from  pity?  I  sorry  for  her?  Oh,  never.  And  I'veS 
been  attracted  often,  you  know.  Once  I  was  in  love  with  a 
grande  dame,  bestially  in  love,  doglike.  Well,  she  gave  me  a 
rendezvous,  and  I  didn't,  couldn't  keep  it,  because  suddenly  Ij 
thought  of  her  husband  and  it  made  me  feel  sick.  And  you 
know,  it's  queer,  that  now  when  I  look  back,  instead  of  being 
glad  that  I  was  decent  I  am  as  sorry  as  if  I  had  sinned.  But 
with  Masha  (  the  gypsy  girl  )  it's  so  different ;  I'm  filled  up 
with  joy  that  I've  never  soiled  the  brightness  of  my  feeling 
for.  her." 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE  PHANTASY  LIFE  67 

Something  plays  beneath  the  surface  of  these  revelations. 
There  are  elements  underlying  these  experiences  which  sug- 
gest a  deeper  flood  of  unrest,  of  strange  doubts  and  phantasies 
and  fears,  which  must  belong  only  to  the  inner  life  of  the  man 
himself  rather  than  to  any  outward  circumstance,  which  prevent 
normal  definite  reactions  either  in  such  situations  or  in  the  way 
of  escape  from  them.  The  adult  form  of  reaction  is  direct, 
decisive  either  directly  toward  a  certain  goal  or  determinately 
away  from  it,  while  the  infantile,  uncertain  form  is  wavering, 
vacillating,  inefficient  and  inadequate  toward  the  event  and  un- 
certain in  its  attempt  to  flee  from  it.  Such  very  plainly  is 
the  nature  of  the  baser  affair,  such  was  the  inability  either 
to  give  or  to  respond  to  the  fulness  of  the  gypsy's  love  for 
him  or  to  find  in  it  more  than  a  dream  of  autoerotic  phantasy 
satisfaction.  Only  there  was  the  saving  strength  to  make  one 
final  effort  of  separation  even  from  this,  and  then  the  plunge 
into  deeper  autoerotic  drinking. 

But  already  in  the  early  scene  in  the  gypsy  resort  and  in 
the  reminiscence  of  it  a  little  later  in  Fedya's  own  poor  room, 
there  is  the  ecstasy  of  the  unreal  dream,  made  up  of  music, 
mysterious  semidarkness  and  wine,  the  appeal  of  a  simple  al- 
most primitive  sensuousness  but  which,  like  Masha  herself, 
"  unlocks  the  gates  of  heaven,"  that  is  the  gates  of  the  region 
of  sheer  self  indulgent  phantasy.  To  watch  his  indolent,  un- 
responsive attitude  as  he  lies  in  the  gypsy  room  steeped  in 
alcohol,  drunk  even  with  the  excess  of  phantasy,  is  to  realize 
the  depth  of  sheer  autoerotic  ecstasy  of  dreaming  into  which 
the  alcohol  permits  him  to  enter.  It  is  a  complete  substitu- 
tion of  the  unreality  of  phantasy  for  the  tortures  which  arise 
from  the  reality  toward  which  he  is  able  to  offer  only  an  un- 
satisfying inadequacy  and  inefficiency.  It  is  doubtless  some- 
thing of  the  nobleness  which  he  still  retains  which  leads  him 
to  refuse  to  return  to  his  wife  at  the  request  of  the  messenger 
she  sends.  It  is,  furthermore,  as  can  be  judged  by  the  weak- 
ness later  displayed,  the  inherent  inability  to  arise  and  master 
reality  by  seizing  it  as  it  offers  itself. 

But  why  this  weakness  which  besets  him  at  every  hand  and 
which  has  first  driven  him  upon  the  path  of  dangerous  self 


68  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

indulgence?  Why  are  such  things  so  in  the  psychic  world? 
If  the  choice  of  a  course  of  action  lay  only  in  outside  cir- 
cumstances most  of  us  would  have  reason  enough  to  choose 
at  one  turn  and  another  the  useful  and  safe  and  prosperous 
way  of  action.  We  are,  however,  governed  by  stronger  im- 
pulses, the  force  of  which  and  even  the  existence  of  which 
is  hidden  from  conscious  recognition.  Only,  as  Bergson 
says,  through  a  few  messengers  from  the  unconscious,  which 
succeed  in  smuggling  themselves  through  the  half  open  door, 
do  we  have  any  inkling  of  the  past  of  desire  and  the  feeling 
associated  with  it  which  we  are  dragging  behind  us  at  all 
times.  To  some  these  recollections  and  the  affects  attached 
to  them  are  scarcely  perceptible  or  troublesome.  They  form 
some  of  the  slight  distractions,  peculiarities,  negligible  super- 
stitions, half  admitted  fears,  unguarded  slips  of  the  tongue, 
any  one  of  the  trivial  factors  which  barely  disturb  the  even 
tenor  of  the  conscious  course  of  action.  With  many,  others 
these  smugglers  are  of  greater  power  to  disturb.  They  indi- 
cate less  serenity  and  satisfaction  in  the  unconscious  sphere 
and  they  appear  perhaps  in  horrid  form  or  they  serve  to  drive 
the  individual  to  some  such  artificial  and  harmful  relief  as 
that  which  Fedya  sought. 

Fedya  too  confesses  to  certain  of  these  unbidden  messen- 
gers, and  they  point  to  some  nucleus  in  his  past  life,  probably 
as  in  most  individuals  belonging  first  to  the  remote  period  of 
childish  desire.  For  here  at  that  early  time  desire  rules  su- 
preme, there  is  not  yet  the  later  correction  through  both  reason 
and  experience  with  an  external  world.  The  child's  desires 
are  intense  and  selfish  and  can  in  themselves  at  first  brook 
no  interference.  Yet  the  interference  of  reality  with  phantasy 
cannot  be  avoided  and  certain  children,  less  easily  able  in  their 
natures  to  adjust  to  such  outside  influence,  repress  into  the 
unconscious  these  desires  in  all  their  intensity.  These  desires 
by  their  very  overstrong  repression  tend  to  lose  contact  with 
reality  and  thus  to  develop  into  an  exaggeration  of  phantasy, 
both  the  unreal  substitute  pleasures  which  phantasy,  even  in  the 
unconscious,  may  offer,  and  the  opposite  feelings  of  revenge, 


ALCOHOLISM    AND  THE   PHANTASY  LIFE  69 

anger,  and  jealousy.  Then  only  later  when  life  offers  perhaps 
some  special  difficulty  and  even  adult  interest  recedes  from 
the  real  world  to  join  such  phantasies,  do  they  attain  strength 
enough  to  appear  in  some  covert  or  disguised  form  to  disturb 
the  external  life.  Or  it  may  be  that  a  conscious  adult  joy 
can  be  after  all  only  looked  upon  by  the  individual  through 
the  eyes  of  such  infantile  phantasy,  self  centered  unsocialized 
pleasures  and  angry  injured  feelings,  and  the  conscious  adult 
joy  which  presents  itself  turns  to  dust  and  ashes.  The  child 
situation  is  brought  up  against  the  adult  circumstances  and 
fails  to  fit;  instead  the  whole  adult  situation  is  distorted  and 
spoiled. 

Something  of  this  sort  seems  to  have  been  the  case  with 
Fedya.  At  least  he  admits  that  his  life  has  failed  in  the  face 
of  all  that  was  fair  and  prosperous  in  outlook.  Before  he 
began  to  drink  "  everything  I  did,"  he  says,  "  disappointed  me 
so,  made  me  so  ashamed  of  myself."  He  had  education,  finan- 
cial position,  a  charming  and  loving  wife,  but  peace  he  had  not. 
Something  within  himself  beyond  outward  circumstances  dis- 
turbed all  this.  It  had  come,  as  we  hear  in  that  confession 
of  his  later  life  in  the  drinking  slum,  to  poison  all  the  love 
and  happiness  of  his  married  life.  The  other  relation,  the 
bestial  relation  with  the  grande  dame,  seems  to  have  been  in- 
terfered with  not  so  much  by  a  moral  scruple  but  by  the  same 
sort  of  feeling  applied  in  a  different  direction.  It  was  the 
thought  of  the  husband  which  had  made  him  sick  and  deter- 
mined him  so  suddenly  to  flee  the  rendezvous.  The  same  thing 
working  in  another  direction  drives  him  from  his  wife  to  find 
forgetfulness  in  degradation  and  chiefly  in  drink. 

We  have  not  here  the  details  of  an  analysis  but  we  may 
perhaps  draw  by  analogy  from  the  many  such  instances  that 
have  passed  before  the  review  of  the  psychoanalyst.  These  have 
discovered  such  psychic  difficulty  arising  in  infancy  in  the  re- 
action of  the  child  in  its  strong  wishes  directed  positively,  pri- 
marily, toward  the  parent  of  the  opposite  sex  and  negatively, 
that  is  fearsomely  and  hostilely,  toward  the  one  of  the  same 
sex  as  the  rival.  The  long  dormancy  of  these  wishes  as  they 


7O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

lie  waiting  in  the  unconscious  for  a  suitable  occasion  for  dis- 
charge explains  their  seeming  unreasonableness  and  their  abrupt 
compulsive  as  well  as  hallucinatory  character  when  they  finally 
gain  access  to  consciousness,  but  even  then  only  in  a  somewhat 
changed  and  redirected  form.  In  fact  it  is  one  frequent  manner 
of  defense  to  throw  them  in  conscious  accusation  upon  some 
one  else  or  upon  outward  circumstances. 

In  this  manner  Fedya  had  come  to  doubt  the  sincerity  and 
wholeheartedness  of  his  wife,  Lisa's  love.  To  her  he  attributes 
the  unconscious  division  of  the  affections  which  probably  exists 
in  his  own  heart.  The  faithful  friend,  Victor,  who  had  loved 
her  earlier  unsuccessfully  stands  to  his  mind  as  a  ready  and 
natural  vehicle  for  this  disloyalty  on  her  part.  Yet  con- 
sciously he  can  not  justly  accuse  either  of  them,  so  it  is  only 
in  the  hallucinatory  phantasy  of  the  night  when  she  lies  in- 
nocently asleep  by  his  side  that  these  thoughts  rise  within  him 
and  force  him  from  his  bed  and  finally  drive  him  permanently 
from  his  home.  The  old  child  phantasy  regarding  the  father 
and  the  mother  is  apparently  at  work.  The  doubt  is  there  of 
the  mother's  purity  and  loyalty  because  his  own  wish,  unex- 
pressed, is  in  conflict  with  the  knowledge,  however  indefinite, 
of  her  relation  to  the  father.  Because  the  child  is  excluded 
from  this  he  reacts  unconsciously  also  with  consequent  hatred 
and  hostility  to  the  father. 

Fedya  had  felt  from  the  first  that  he  had  to  share  the  love 
that  he  wanted  with  some  other  man.  That  at  least  was  his 
rationalizing  conscious  way  of  putting  the  deeply  unconscious 
gnawing,  yet  forbidden  desire  from  the  childhood.  It  was  the 
outward  expression  of  the  jealousy,  the  craving  for  the  love  that 
belonged  to  another  before  it  belonged  to  him.  He  attributes 
to  the  wife  then  the  unconscious  love  which  he  does  not  know 
how  to  admit  in  himself.  "  Yes,  I  think  she's  always  loved 
him,  far,  far  down  beneath  what  she  could  admit  to  herself, 
and  this  feeling  of  mine  has  been  a  black  shadow  across  our 
married  life."  "  Yes,  no  brightness  could  suck  up  that  shadow. 
And  so  I  suppose  I  never  was  satisfied  with  what  my  wife  gave 
me,  and  I  looked  for  every  kind  of  distraction,  sick  at  heart 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE  PHANTASY  LIFE 


7! 


because  I  did  so."  These  words  are  an  admission  rather  of 
inner  conflict  than  of  disappointment  and  grief  from  merely  the 
possible  external  factor  of  his  wife's  lack  of  love  to  him.  The 
psychopathologist  knows  that  such  sickness  of  heart  is  not  a 
reaction  to  outside  difficulties  and  losses  even  of  the  most  serious 
kind.  Reality  calls  for  a  more  healthy,  healing  reaction.  Inner 
conflicts,  one's  own  self  involvement  through  unconscious  im- 
pulses and  distraught  phantasies,  are  rather  the  source  of  such 
distress. 

Then  out  of  these  inner  phantasies,  the  strange  hidden  con- 
tent of  them,  which  has  its  coloring  from  the  unreasoning  jeal- 
ousy of  infancy,  arises  his  maddening  hallucination.  "  Do  you 
know  when  she  lay  there  asleep  beside  me,"  he  says  with  a 
shrill  laugh,  as  he  lays  bare  his  heart  to  the  sympathetic  com- 
panion in  the  drinking  den,  "  I  would  hear  him,  pushing  open 
the  door,  crawling  into  the  room,  coming  to  me  on  his  hands 
and  knees,  grovelling,  whining,  begging  me  "  —  and  by  this  time 
Fedya  is  almost  shouting  in  a  suppressed  way  —  "  for  her,  for 
her;  imagine  it!  And  I,  I  had  to  get  up  and  give  my  place  to 
him.  Phew!  then  I'd  come  to  myself." 

There  is  a  conflict  in  such  a  soul  deeper  than  any  outer  cir- 
cumstance is  able  to  occasion.  It  expresses  horrible  contortions 
of  phantasy  built  out  of  the  exaggerated  occupation  with  the 
thoughts  first  innocently  conceived  in  infancy,  very  vaguely 
conscious  or  entirely  unconscious  even  then.  But  lacking  thor- 
ough healthy  reaction  with  reality  they  have  nowhere  to  go  but 
back  upon  the  inner  self.  They  have  prevented  a  wholesome 
joyous  attitude  toward  the  love  object  who  had  willingly  chosen 
him  in  preference  to  the  other  man,  and  who  held  her  love  to 
him  long  after  he  had  cast  aside  all  sembance  of  a  forced 
outward  devotion  to  her.  He  was  true  in  his  intention  and 
wish  toward  her  and  yet  the  fiercer  grip  of  the  unconscious 
drove  him  upon  his  way  of  equally  forced  disloyalty  and  un- 
faithfulness toward  her.  Other  features  of  the  inner  conflict, 
other  forms  of  phantasy  and  struggle,  which  it  develops  or 
through  which  it  passes  in  the  unconscious  in  order  to  drive 
into  the  particular  form  which  leads  down  the  road  of  alcoholic 


72  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

indulgence,  have  not  been  indicated  or  suggested  as  these  have. 
It  is  simply  shown  that  alcohol  dulled  the  pain  of  conflict 
and  of  defeat.  It  also  marked  the  path  of  defeat,  for  it  proved 
a  quick  and  unhindered  way  into  the  phantasy  which  appeared 
so  hideous  so  long  as  conscious  struggle  against  the  unknown 
force  had  to  be  maintained.  For  it  and  the  surroundings  in  which 
it  was  first  indulged  opened  wide  the  gates  of  sheer  indulgent 
phantasy  where  the  conscious  monitor  was  stilled.  One  can 
easily  believe  also,  in  the  face  of  the  high  ideals  which  Fedya 
yet  preserved  within  himself  and  in  his  relations  to  these  other 
characters,  that  the  better,  higher  nature,  the  unquenchable  yet 
losing  side  in  the  struggle  was  demanding  as  a  sort  of  com- 
promise a  penance  of  degradation  and  self  abasement  for  the 
darker  nature  of  the  phantasies  which  were  being  striven  against. 
In  such  strange  compromises,  half  yieldings,  half  indulgences, 
losses  and  sufferings,  there  is  after  all  an  egotistic  satisfaction 
and  pleasure  in  self  abasement  and  self  inflictions. 

What  after  all  is  the  purpose  of  such  a  play,  even  though 
an  unspoken,  an  unconsciously  presented  one?  Is  there  real 
value  in  thus  portraying  human  weakness  and  downfall?  What, 
it  may  be  asked,  is  it  that  so  claims  the  attention  and  sympathy 
in  the  representation  of  this  losing  conflict?  It  is  not  alone 
that  the  physician  may  find  in  it  some  definite  object  lesson  with 
which  to  arm  himself  for  his  work  of  understanding  and  help. 
The  appeal  is  a  far  more  universal  one.  It  is  necessary,  and 
each  spectator's  undefined  reception  of  such  a  play  testifies  to 
this,  that  we  should  look  more  deeply  into  the  conflict  with 
which  each  life  is  beset,  which  solves  itself  for  each  in  his  own 
best  way  or  which  transforms  itself  into  something  which  is 
no  solution  but  only  a  distortion,  a  failure,  a  defeat  which  in 
one  form  or  another  has  arisen  out  of  it.  It  is  necessary 
furthermore  that  our  objective  attitude  toward  failure,  defeat, 
degradation,  as  seen  in  the  world  all  about,  should  be  more 
definitely  and  more  profoundly  understood.  This  means  that 
they  should  be  known  in  their  causation  and  in  the  mechanism 
of  transformation.  This  entails  knowledge  of  the  causation 
by  which  they  arise  from  deeply  laid  unconscious  impulses  and 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE   PHANTASY  LIFE  73 

of  the  struggle  which  these  necessarily  have  with  the  higher 
conscious  and  social  impulses  and  desires.  It  necessitates  un- 
derstanding the  mechanism  whereby  they  appear  in  such  indirect 
and  little  comprehended  manifestations  as  alcoholic  indulgence 
and  precipitate  or  seemingly  deliberate  choice  of  degradation 
and  ruin. 

That  they  are  not  in  real  fact  such,  Fedya's  own  heartbroken 
explanations  testify.  So  also  do  the  ringing  words  with  which 
he  makes  his  vain  appeal  to  the  befogged  understanding  of  the 
magistrate  in  the  court  of  so-called  justice.  This  man's  under- 
standing is  under  the  control  of  formal  conventions.  These 
are  too  rigid  defenses  against  the  admittance  into  conscious 
thought  of  the  force  and  power  of  the  inner  impulses,  a  fear 
and  indolence  under  which  society  hides  itself  from  the  arduous 
task  of  really  understanding  and  wisely,  helpfully  dealing  with 
men's  mistakes  and  crimes,  which  are  impelled  from  within  by 
these  forces.  The  material  with  which  they  have  to  do  is  real 
and  vital,  it  is  human  life  itself  in  all  its  possibility  of  good 
or  evil.  This  they  forget  because  they  want  to  defend  them- 
selves from  the  further  implication  of  this  fact,  that  this  ma- 
terial, because  it  is  human,  vital,  is  the  great  explosive  force 
of  the  world,  just  as  it  is  the  great  creative  force,  and  so  can 
work  utter  destruction.  Therefore  the  latter  possibility  creates 
the  fear  that  formally  hides  both  itself  and  the  creative  and 
recreative  possibility  under  the  hard  and  self  protective  forma- 
lism, which  is  perhaps  more  conspicuous  in  the  legal  circles 
than  in  any  other  branch  of  society. 

Fedya  is  brought  at  last  into  court,  a  wretched,  shambling 
figure.  He  is  physically  repulsive,  he  is  mentally  abject.  There 
is  however  still  in  him  enough  of  the  divine  spark  of  the  better 
endeavor  to  be  roused  once  more  into  hot  protest  and  burning 
pronouncement  of  the  truth.  He  is  not  here  for  his  own  mis- 
demeanors. The  irony  of  misnamed  justice  is  bitterly  in  evi- 
dence. His  act  of  self  effacement  for  the  happiness  of  others 
and  the  ridding  of  them  of  his  presence,  the  one  disturbing 
factor  to  their  happy  usefulness  together,  has  been  vilely  dragged 


74  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

into  the  light  for  material  gain.  Some  blackmailer  who  had 
overheard  his  life's  confession  to  the  drinking  companion  has 
made  capital  of  it  by  hauling  the  one  time  wife  and  her  present 
husband  into  court  on  a  charge  of  bigamy.  The  righteousness 
of  the  law  would  reunite  her  to  the  base  counterpart  of  a  man 
which  is  all  that  is  left  of  her  former  husband,  and  exile  the 
man  whom  she  has  come  to  love  and  honor  most  sincerely  and 
with  whom  she  was  living  a  life  of  upright  sincerity  and  peace. 

The  self  righteous  zeal  of  the  law  would  simply  hurl  the 
whole  psychic  conflict  in  all  its  lurid  impurity  and  untruth  back 
upon  their  heads.  Fedya,  however,  in  the  final  clear  nobility 
of  thought  and  appreciation  flashing  through  his  abjectness, 
catches  at  last  also  the  clear  pathway  of  courage,  as  clear  a 
one  perhaps  as  can  be  left  for  one  so  long  straying  from  def- 
inite mental  purpose  and  direction.  At  last  he  has  the  courage 
to  do  that  which  he  could  not  do  years  before  and  he  solves 
the  impenetrable  problem  by  taking  his  own  life.  This  is  not, 
however,  before  he  has  uttered  a  last  ringing  arraignment  of 
the  falseness  of'  the  conventions  under  which  the  law  and 
society  hide  all  attempt  to  comprehend  the  profound  psychic 
truths  of  which  he  has  the  full  measure  of  experience.  His 
plea  is  that  which  the  play  must  make  to  every  one.  It  must 
also  come  with  peculiar  force  to  those  special  guardians  and 
manipulators  of  the  welfare  of  society  and  of  the  individuals 
which  compose  it,  as  represented  in  our  legal  bodies,  or  our 
medical  workers,  or  any  other  profession  or  group  which  pre- 
sumes to  hold  the  reins  of  social  government  and  individual 
regulation. 

"  The  truth,  O  God,  what  do  you  know  about  the  truth  ? 
Your  business  is  crawling  up  into  a  little  power,  that  you  may 
use  it  by  tantalizing,  morally  not  physically,  people  a  thousand 
times  better  than  you.  .  .  .  I'll  speak  as  I  feel  and  you 
write  it  down.  So  for  once  some  human  words  will  get  into 
a  deposition.  .  .  .''  And  the  besotted  voice  goes  on,  once 
more  convincing  and  manly  in  the  truth  it  speaks :  "  We 
were  all  in  a  spiritual  struggle  beyond  your  comprehension ;  the 


ALCOHOLISM   AND  THE  PHANTASY  LIFE  75 

struggle  between  anguish  and  peace;  between  falsehood  and 
truth.  You,  the  defender  of  public  justice,  the  appointed  guar- 
dian of  morality  .  .  .  receive  on  the  2Oth  of  each  month  a  few 
kopeks'  gratuity  for  your  wretched  business,  you  get  into 
your  uniform,  and  in  good  spirits  proceed  to  torture  —  bully 
people  who  wouldn't  admit  you  across  their  doorstep.  Then 
when  you've  had  your  fill  of  showing  off  your  wretched 
power,  oh  then  you  are  satisfied,  and  sit  and  smile  there  in 
your  damned  complacent  dignity.  How  can  you  punish  me," 
he  asks,  beating  his  breast,  "  who  am  suffering  the  worst  there 
is.  ...  How  absurd  you  would  be  if  you  weren't  so  vile." 
And  then,  when  his  plea  falls  fruitless,  as  of  course  it  could 
not  alter  the  rigidly  determined  events  of  the  law,  he  takes 
the  one  remaining  way  to  circumvent  the  artificiality  of  the 
law  and  ends  his  life.  By  overcoming  his  fear  at  the  end  he 
grants  freedom  to  those  whom  his  impotence  and  self  indul- 
gence, or  the  complexes  which  had  lain  behind  these,  had  bound 
with  himself.  His  own  freedom  is  won,  too,  but  with  loss  as 
he  ends  the  useless  life  and  sinks  at  last  into  the  complete 
unreality,  which  with  his  last  breath  he  calls  "  Happiness." 
It  is  a  drama  that  attempts  to  draw  no  solution  out  of  its 
presented  features  of  character  and  action.  It  is  Ibsenian 
rather  in  that  it  teaches  or  convicts  in  its  representation  of  life 
as  it  is,  as  it  exists  deep  in  the  mental  life  beneath  the  external 
conflicts  and  failures  in  which  it  is  clothed.  It  seeks  to  elab- 
orate no  explanation,  to  point  no  moral.  It  does,  however, 
lay  human  psychic  life  before  its  audience,  first  appealingly, 
that  it  may  rouse  our  sympathetic  appreciation,  introduce  us 
as  it  were  into  the  reality  of  the  psychic  problems.  Then  in 
a  faithful  manner  it  pictures  and  develops  these  to  their  in- 
evitable outcome,  with  many  a  sidelight  also  on  the  petty  com- 
plications of  emotion  and  feeling  which  blind  judgment  and 
distort  reality  while  they  separate  thus  the  self  righteous  from 
those  who  make  the  more  signal  failures.  Its  impressive  les- 
son is  that  those  who  witness  the  drama  should  not  be  among 
the  self  righteous  in  the  appraisal  and  condemnation  of  such 


76  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

weaknesses,  but  should  rather  understand  them  as  conditioned 
by  psychic  occurrences.  They  should  be  regarded  as  attitudes 
of  deepest  and  remotest  origin  revealing  themselves  in  real  life 
in  these  unsuccessful  forms.  Thus  there  is  given  greater  in- 
sight into  these  as  disease  conditions  to  be  psychically  and  so- 
cially met  and  understood  and  helped  as  such. 


CHAPTER    VI 
THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  x 

A  still  more  analytical  search  into  the  unconscious  than  this 
frank  and  open  revelation  which  has  just  been  considered  would 
reveal  the  great  variety  of  wishes  and  strivings  that  are  there 
at  work.  This  would  give  explanation  to  externally  expressed 
peculiarities  of  character  which  would  help  toward  a  better 
adjustment  of  these  in  relation  to  other  men  and  women.  The 
pattern  of  thinking  and  feeling  in  the  unconscious  is  very  differ- 
ent from  the  carefully  guarded  and  selected  one  of  consciousness, 
yet  this  careful  selection  so  distorts  and  warps  the  inner  im- 
pulses that  the  unpleasant  characteristics  show  how  conscious- 
ness bungles  its  task.  The  larger  relation  to  a  variety  of  factors 
of  the  mental  life  as  well  as  the  better  possibility  of  relationship 
in  the  use  of  the  impulses  from  which  they  arise  are  not  under- 
stood by  viewing  conscious  appearance  alone. 

The  sordid  and  the  gay,  earthly  love  and  heavenly  joy,  merry 
making  and  religious  festival,  and  even  the  gentle  kindness  of 
ministration  and  the  darker  things  of  envy  and  greed,  all  these 
lie  closer  in  the  unconscious  than  we  are  accustomed  to  think. 
Conscious  thought  rudely  separates  them  from  one  another,  — 
this  is  the  imperfect  attempt  to  dissolve  the  mystery  of  the 
ever  shifting  confluence  of  the  varying  elements  of  life.  Or- 
dinary thought  is  so  careful  in  real  life  to  separate  one  interest 
out  from  another  that  one  gains  its  value  only  at  the  expense 
of  the  other.  The  latter  then  only  comes  to  shrivel  or  to  turn 
sour  upon  happiness  and  cheerfulness  of  disposition  or  it  pre- 
cipitates hopeless  conflict  in  which  health  of  mind  is  impossible. 
The  resulting  misunderstanding,  hatred,  envy,  jealousy,  self  seek- 
ing, the  mental  sickness  of  any  sort,  even  often  the  bodily  ailment 

1  Charles  Rann  Kennedy:  The  Army  with  Banners.  B.  W.  Huebsch, 
New  York,  1919. 

77 


78  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

are  distortion  and  marring  of  that  which  should  have  been  sweet- 
ness and  light.  The  petty  and  partial  interests  with  which  we 
occupy  ourselves  fail  themselves  to  draw  a  real  sustenance, 
and  progress  and  constructiveness  are  also  absent.  For  there 
is  lacking  that  fundamental  unity  where  sordid  and  spiritual, 
earthly  and  heavenly  have  their  common  source  and  receive 
their  mutual  power  and  value.  The  quick  daring  flash  of  the 
dream  reveals  not  only  the  manifold  aspects  of  truth  in  such 
varied  phases  but  the  greater  truth  as  well  which  comprises 
these  in  one  great  vital  fact,  which  is  life  itself. 

"  The  Army  with  Banners  "  attempts  to  bring  some  of  these 
apparently  incongruous  elements  into  the  setting  of  their  mutual 
relation.  It  does  so  by  utilizing  the  ordinary  conscious  attitude 
of  misunderstanding  and  ignorance  of  this  relationship,  thus 
through  it  to  reveal  gradually  the  deeper  interrelationship  and 
the  fellowship,  which  this  really  entails.  It  has  to  call  to  its 
service  of  revelation  also  the  manifest  forms  of  hatred  which 
arise.  The  playwright  calls  it  rightfully  a  "  Divine  Comedy  " 
for  it  bears  a  message  of  the  humor  with  which  life's  incon- 
gruities interplay  as  well  as  the  minor  tragedy  with  which  the 
incarnated  devils  of  hatred,  envy  and  all  the  selfish  partialities 
of  life  tear  aside  life's  unity  and  harmony  each  for  its  own 
ends.  Thus  are  the  soundness  and  wholeness  of  mutual  living 
and  thinking  sadly  disturbed. 

The  playing  of  such  a  comedy  is  allowed  place  in  an  old  thir- 
teenth century  nunnery,  now  an  orphanage  under  the  care  of 
Mary  Bliss.  There  is  a  spontaneous  freedom  in  her  outlook 
upon  life  but  this  is  somewhat  hindered  and  its  brightness  en- 
feebled by  a  too  childish  trustfulness  and  lack  of  alertness 
in  regard  to  its  full  meaning.  The  possibilities  which  lie  in 
the  contact  of  her  home  with  a  vital  active  modern  world  are 
somewhat  dimmed  by  the  too  idealistic  peace  which  hovers 
over  it.  For  this  reason  it  is  only  too  ready  for  the  entrance 
into  the  happy  scene  of  certain  dividing  elements  which  mar 
the  perfection  themselves  revealing  ignominious  and  shameful 
depths  of  the  human  mind.  But  out  of  this  there  comes  a 
clearer  knowledge  of  all  the  truth  and  life  is  lifted  from  its 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  79 

childishly  meaningless  roseate  dreams  to  a  more  vivid  and  hearty 
interest  in  reality. 

Certain  friends  of  Mary  Bliss,  more  worldly  than  she,  con- 
stitute themselves  presumably  her  guardians  though  their  hard 
self  interest  comes  openly  to  the  fore.  Because  in  her  wider 
appreciation  of  inner  realities,  she  gives  freer  vent  to  these  in 
her  beliefs  and  actions,  they  label  her  with  a  static  disease 
term  so  that  this  may  satisfy  their  usual  rational  tendency 
always  formally  to  define  what  is  too  wide  for  the  common 
understanding  and  also  to  justify  to  themselves  and  others  their 
interference  by  making  it  appear  necessary.  So  they  call  her 
a  victim  of  dementia  precox,  apparently  because  she  brings 
somewhat  nearer  the  conscious  surface  some  of  the  older  ways 
of  thinking  and  acting  which  have  been  relegated  to  the  un- 
conscious. She  conforms  not  only  her  conscious  activity  largely 
to  the  lines  of  religious  symbolism  and  gives  that  a  more  con- 
stant place  in  her  daily  life  than  is  ordinarily  accorded  today, 
but  she  reveals  much  of  its  actual  inner  meaning,  closer  to 
the  unity  of  life  in  the  sphere  of  love  than  it  also  is  ordinarily 
accepted  to  lie.  And  it  must  be  admitted  that  her  behavior 
belongs  to  an  earlier  period  of  history. 

Therefore  the  professed  friends  have  come  to  take  charge 
of  her  behavior  and  exert  restraint  upon  her  on  the  very  day 
when  she  is  expecting  the  return  of  the  Lord  from  heaven. 
For  this  she  has  prepared  in  the  most  matter  of  fact  way,  uti- 
lizing all  the  interests  of  her  daily  life,  the  activities  of  the 
children  in  the  school,  their  play  even  more  than  their  work, 
and  adorning  herself  as  a  bride  awaiting  her  bridegroom.  In- 
to this  scene  of  expectation  the  assembled  friends  launch  their 
plans  for  convincing  her  of  the  unreality  of  her  ways.  Their 
finally  executed  plan  is  to  offset  her  dreams  with  the  rude 
introduction  of  a  representative  of  the  crude  and  crass  practical 
religion  which  merely  seeks  to  haul  souls  out  of  perdition  to 
salvation  with  but  scant  appreciation  of  the  full  and  slowly 
developing  possibilities  of  these  souls  and  the  life  which  they 
convey.  Tommy  Trail  is  the  embodiment  of  all  that  is  offensive 
and  harsh  in  a  religion  which  has  blatantly  offset  itself  against 


8O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

the  inner  realities  in  their  relation  to  the  actual  desires  and 
pleasures  of  life.  He  it  is  who  comes  intruding  upon  Mary 
Bliss  and  her  gentle  and  happy  readiness  for  her  Lord.  She 
is  puzzled  and  disturbed  but  so  complete  is  her  trustful  obedi- 
ence to  His  word  that  she  believes  at  first  that  it  is  only  her 
blindness  and  lack  of  perfect  development  which  makes  His 
manner  of  coming  seem  harsh.  Her  eyes  are  opened  at  last 
however  to  the  revolting  character  of  the  intrusion  and  to  the 
duplicity  of  her  friends.  This  serves  not  to  stun  her  however 
and  cast  her  down,  but  it  does  bring  about  the  desirable  union 
of  her  gentler  withdrawal  into  the  blissful  happy  things  which 
are  largely  of  dreams  and  that  outer  ruder  but  more  real  life 
with  which  her  contact  had  not  been  sufficient.  It  is  then  her 
time  of  triumph  or  rather  that  of  her  greater  knowledge  and 
faith,  when  the  narrowness  of  her  would  be  friends  withers 
before  the  denunciations  of  her  faithful  servitor  Dafty.  They 
pale  also  before  the  vision  of  Mary  Bliss  as  she  represents 
the  full  victory  and  glory  of  a  church  which  appears  as  "  clear 
as  the  sun,  fair  as  the  moon  and  terrible  as  an  army  with 
banners." 

Dafty  has  stood  on  the  side  of  truth  throughout  the  trans- 
formations that  have  taken  place.  He  seems  to  be  always  on 
hand,  slyly  appearing  when  the  plots  are  thickest,  bringing  to 
light  the  simple  joyousness  of  the  more  natural  life  with  the 
children  when  the  false  complaints  of  the  others  are  darkest. 
At  the  last  he  is  thunderous  in  his  proclamation  of  the  mys- 
teries of  death  and  life,  the  depths  of  darkness  and  sin,  which 
he  says  he  has  traversed,  and  the  union  of  all  these  in  a  life 
which  is  full  and  free  indeed  and  before  which  the  pettinesses 
have,  as  he  threateningly  repeats,  only  six,  five,  four,  yes,  only 
one  minute  yet  to  live. 

In  this  general  plot  of  the  play  each  character  deserves  a 
special  examination  since  each  one  represents  his  or  her  part 
in  this  separateness  of  impulses,  the  factors  which  apart  work 
so  destructively  and  disastrously  and  together  are  capable  of  the 
complete  harmony  of  a  life  both  serviceable  and  happy. 

The  viewpoint  of  Mary  Bliss,  charming  as  it  is  in  contrast 
to  the  darker  ones  of  her  advisers  and  spies,  is  only  one  of 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  8l 

those  partial  ones  in  which  men  and  women  seek  so  success- 
fully to  enfold  themselves  that  a  broader  practical  compre- 
hension of  life  in  its  duties  and  opportunities  slips  out  of 
sight.  The  latter  view  requires  a  high  courage  of  thought  and 
incessant,  often  difficult  constructive  labor  upon  the  matters  of 
reality.  So  these  are  set  aside  for  a  beauty  and  attractiveness 
in  retirement.  The  roughness  and  the  uncouth  shapes  in  which 
the  crude  unfinished  reality  of  the  world  presents  itself  to  the 
creative  hand  for  further  making  are  thereby  avoided.  To 
such  dreamers  and  idealists  the  beauty  of  past  achievement, 
the  esthetic  result  of  that  already  accomplished  is  enough,  or 
this  failing  to  fill  out  all  desire  and  emptiness  the  rest  is 
rendered  even  more  sumptuously  complete  by  the  infinity  of 
dreams. 

Such  dreams  are  not  necessarily  altogether  incompatible  with 
a  life  of  beautiful  and  helpful  service  to  one's  fellows.  Some- 
times they  are  especially  serviceable  to  the  weary  or  the  old 
and  worn,  or  even  in  a  guarded  measure  to  the  play  time  of 
little  children  and  the  beginning  of  their  entrance  into  life's 
sterner  lessons.  Man  cannot  live  by  bread  alone.  His  dreams 
remain  somehow  with  him  because  they  are  indispensable. 
Nevertheless  there  is  a  danger,  if  he  relies  too  much  upon 
them  or  turns  too  frequently  to  their  attractions,  that  there 
will  steadily  result  more  and  more  a  severance  with  reality  and 
with  the  harder  tasks  and  the  harder  truths  which  it  presents. 

Such  is  the  danger,  the  unreality  that  on  the  one  hand  lies 
in  the  gentleness,  the  joyousness,  the  merry  happiness  of  Mary 
Bliss.  And  yet  these  descriptive  words  which  arise  to  char- 
acterize her  and  her  life  in  the  nunnery  remind  one  again 
that  this  was  not  all  vain;  far  from  it.  But  she  needed  an 
awakening,  to  add,  as  she  learns  to  say,  to  the  harmlessness 
of  the  dove  the  wisdom  of  the  serpent,  something  that  awak- 
ens to  real  life  as  it  is  and  as  it  thrusts  itself  even  within 
her  retreat.  Her  hypocritical  friends  are  pleased  to  stigmatize 
her  with  the  term  dementia  precox,  as  if  the  last  word  needed 
for  understanding  and  sympathy  and  fellow  feeling  were  thus 
uttered,  or  indeed  were  no  longer  needed,  as  if  one  such  whole- 


82  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

sale  characterization  should  sum  up  the  situation  and  dismiss 
her  once  for  all  from  any  ordinary  consideration  of  justice 
and  fairness.  It  is  an  unctuous  term  which  these  schemers  after 
their  own  ends  roll  from  their  tongues  in  a  pseudoscientific 
justification  of  the  policy  of  espionage  and  interference  which 
they  plan  to  carry  on.  In  this  way  they  have  this  nominal 
backing  of  scientific  terms,  in  which  also  they  include  the  more 
crafty,  less  easily  duped  Daf ty,  the  devoted  servant  and  friend 
of  the  gentle  lady  not  only,  but  of  truth  in  its  real  essence. 
His  ways  are  obscure  to  the  watchful  plotters  and  different 
from  their  conventional  thought  and  manner  of  speech.  There- 
fore he  is  as  easily  set  aside  as  the  "  paranoiac."  No,  not  so 
easily  put  away  as  the  more  helpless  woman  for  there  is  some- 
thing about  Dafty's  inner  eye  for  the  truth,  his  complacent 
acquaintance  with  mysteries  which  they  have  not  had  his  cour- 
age to  pass  through,  which  makes  them  quail.  They  disguise 
this  though  from  themselves  in  their  attempted  technical  dis- 
missal of  him  as  far  as  they  may  beyond  the  pale  of  ordinary 
reckoning  and  consideration  of  the  affairs  in  hand. 

There  is  certainly  more  than  a  smack  here  of  an  uncon- 
sciously hypocritical  attitude  in  society  toward  that  which  it 
fears  and  yet  is  either  too  indolent  or  too  timorous  boldly 
and  conscientiously  to  come  to  know  and  to  treat  on  terms  of 
understanding  and  mutual  adjustment.  This  is  society's  atti- 
tude even  yet  toward  the  mentally  sick.  This  may  exist  toward 
the  more  pronounced  forms  which  completely  separate  the  sick 
ones  from  the  world  of  activity  or  toward  those  forms  which 
get  but  a  cold  shrug  of  pity  and  blame.  There  is  a  sort  of 
fearful  discharge  of  the  whole  burden  of  really  understanding 
them  by  slipping  their  ailments  under  ,  certain  long  familiar 
names,  such  as  "nervousness"  or  craziness  or  insanity,  by 
members  of  society.  Thus  is  not  exactly  all  duty  done,  but  like 
the  mischief  makers  of  the  play,  they  take  to  themselves  a  special 
unctuousness  of  condemnation  of  the  sufferers  and  consider 
themselves  as  moving  in  an  atmosphere  of  "  I  am  holier  than 
thou,"  or  at  least  saner  and  wiser  than  thou.  In  the  same 
manner  the  attitude  toward  those  whose  maladjustment  to  so- 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  83 

ciety  and  its  demands  is  so  marked  as  to  constitute  them  the 
socially  sick,  those  who  commit  crime,  shows  the  same  blinded 
nature.  Here  too  the  name,  the  long  familiar  and  well  sound- 
ing term  is  enough  to  remove  the  self  righteous  robes  of  a 
nonunderstanding  social  world  from  contamination  with  this 
class,  and  from  the  trouble  to  find  out  the  causes  and  the  cures 
for  their  social  illness. 

This  is  only  apparently  a  digression  from  the  narrative  of 
the  play.  In  fact  it  lies  in  the  very  spirit  and  message  of 
the  play  to  point  out  this  falseness  of  attitude,  this  blindness 
to  the  actual  effort  and  striving  of  human  life.  Such  effort, 
to  be  sure,  fails  here,  succeeds  there,  hides  failure  under  a 
spurious  guise  of  success,  appears  to  succeed  only  because  the 
guage  of  either  is  false  and  falsely  applied.  This  blindness  to 
life  as  it  really  moves  in  the  upward  currents  from  the  depth 
of  every  human  psyche,  as  it  often  shows  turbid  and  confused, 
misses  the  oneness  of  human  life.  The  blindness  is  entrenched 
in  natural  timorousness  and  indolence,  which  makes  it  easier 
to  remain  in  its  own  false  and  petty  interpretations.  Its  own 
small  motes  are  magnified  to  beams,  whereby  all  perspective 
and  relative  value  are  lost. 

Such  then  are  the  personages  assembled  in  Mary  Bliss's  sanc- 
tuary, the  hall  of  her  orphanage.  They  are  the  spirit  of  modern 
shallow  criticism  and  empty  self-seeking  which  can  interpret 
and  speculate  upon  none  but  the  most  superficial  and  restricted 
plane.  Each  has  his  or  her  private  pet  end  in  view  not  only, 
its  very  narrowness  making  them  conflict  with  each  other,  but 
each  has  centered  upon  one  particular  symbolic  symptom  of  his 
or  her  own.  Such  symptom  in  each  one  speaks  louder  than 
the  words  in  which  they  constantly  bring  it  to  the  attention 
of  each  other,  of  the  hatred  and  envy  and  narrowness  and  mu- 
tual enmity,  the  intense  egoism  and  self  interest  of  their  hostile, 
critical  attitude.  This  they  direct  to  the  gentle  unselfish  soul 
under  whose  roof  they  have  gathered,  and  to  all  that  is 
hers.  Not  so  deeply  envious  are  they  in  reality  of  the  worldly 
goods  with  which  she  is  endowed,  which  is  the  envy  they  can 
almost  acknowledge  to  one  another,  as  they  are  of  the  sunshine 


84  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

of  kindliness,  gladness,  pure  enjoyment  of  the  good  things  of 
life,  of  the  positive  things  of  living,  with  which  she  has  sur- 
rounded herself.  She  is  not  so  far  withdrawn  in  her  dreams 
that  they  have  ceased  to  become  outwardly  radiant,  but  she 
has  kept  a  wholesome  vitality  even  in  her  return  to  medieval 
surroundings  and  symbolism.  All  this  is  contrary  to  their  self 
centered  mode  of  living  and  thinking.  Their  peculiar  troubles 
and  sufferings  are  the  reactions  in  which  the  human  psyche  is 
accustomed  to  conceal  its  own  ineffectualness  even  from  itself, 
crystallize  as  it  were  such  imperfection  and  impotence  into 
some  particular  negative  psychic  emotion  directed  toward  the 
outer  world,  which  can  then  unconsciously  create  for  itself 
some  physical  disability,  or  otherwise  project  it  upon  the  ex- 
ternal environment. 

It  is  hardest  for  the  "  man  of  the  past,"  Job  Limp,  to  drag 
himself  into  the  interests  of  things  about  him,  even  as  they 
concern  the  matter  which  has  ostensibly  brought  them  together. 
This  matter  is  the  conversion  of  Mary  Bliss  from  her  dreams 
or  else  the  establishment  of  a  guardianship  over  her  which 
will  give  control  of  her  substance  into  the  hands  of  these 
worthily  inspired  friends.  The  ostensible  desire  for  her  con- 
version is  too  plainly  but  a  mask  for  the  second  desire.  This 
most  clearly  betrays  itself  in  the  very  symptomatic  ailments 
with  which  the  creator  of  the  drama  has  endowed  these  figures, 
no  less  than  in  every  revelation  in  voice,  manner,  excessive 
manifestation  of  zeal  in  the  cause  in  hand,  the  over  protestation 
on  every  side  of  each  individual  egoistically  directed  point  of 
view.  Self  betrayal  truly  oozes  from  every  pore  of  these  char- 
acters, the  self  betrayal  that  subtly  portrays  what  manner  of 
self  deception  in  human  nature  it  is  the  purpose  of  the  play  to 
set  forth. 

It  is  not  strange  then  that  the  man  of  the  past  severs  him- 
self from  all  that  might  make  for  the  joy  of  living,  which  is 
essentially  active,  creative,  progressive,  and  must  sit  by  the  fire 
nursing  the  feeling  of  hatred.  Hatred  is  the  opposite  of  all  this 
and  it  works  on  a  lower  plane  of  metabolism.  In  truth  it 
checks  that  healthy  metabolism  on  which  the  joy  of  living  is 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  85 

dependent  for  its  means  of  expression,  for  its  ability  to  pour 
itself  out  into  constructive  activity.  The  liver  well  serves  as 
the  seat  of  his  soured  attitude  toward  all  things  alive.  The 
derangement,  coincident  with  that  of  the  liver,  of  so  many  other 
organs  and  functions  dependent  to  a  greater  or  less  degree  upon 
its  action,  is  all  indicative  of  the  apt  symbolism  of  this  organ 
to  represent  the  withdrawal  into  himself  of  this  acrid  man  of 
the  past,  who  selfishly  enjoys  even  his  particular  discomfort 
and  whose  only  response  to  his  companions  is  a  selfish,  dis- 
turbed growl.  Medicine  is  coming  to  know,  how  frequently, 
how  almost  invariably  this  form  of  introversion,  self  absorption 
in  one's  own  past,  causes  and  maintains  just  this  sort  of  de- 
rangement on  the  bottom  layer  of  nervous  activity,  that  of  the 
physico-vC'hemical  metabolic  organs  and  functions  of  the  body, 
and  how  symbolic  in  turn  these  are  of  the  very  psychic  factor- 
which  become  the  motivation  of  these  physical  disturbances. 

The  man  with  the  plethoric  heart  is  no  less  symbolically  af- 
flicted. Here  again  whatever  the  organic  reaction  back  upon  his 
psychic  condition  there  is  apparent  a  symbolic  causal  con- 
nection between  his  frequent  suffocating  dyspneic  attacks  and 
the  overreaching  schemes  and  practices  he  is  busied  with, 
whether  robbing  the  children's  penny  boxes  in  the  chapel  or 
plotting  the  sweeping  of  Mary  Bliss's  property  into  his  control. 
Account  must  be  taken  of  the  tremendous  activity  which  the 
libido  or  energy  output  through  psychic  interest  arouses  through 
the  vast  unconscious  "  automatic "  as  well  as  voluntary  con- 
scious control  of  the  functions  of  the  body.  Therefore  it  is 
not  strange  that  his  cardiac  and  respiratory  functions  too 
should  have  learned  an  over  response  to  a  double  disturbance 
conditioned  by  the  continual  double  stimulation  which  must  be 
somehow  adjusted.  Since  it  cannot  run  smoothly,  the  stimuli 
having  to  do  with  two  opposite  paths  of  behavior,  an  imperfect 
compromise,  as  so  often  happens,  is  the  result.  Some  organ  or 
certain  organs  have  to  bear  the  brunt  of  a  continually  precipitated 
conflict  between  the  grossest  self  seeking  on  the  one  hand 
and  on  the  other  the  preserving  of  a  sanctimonious  mien  and 
religious  fervor,  even  though  this  manifests  itself  for  the  most 


86  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

part  in  carping  advocacy  of  the  narrowest  and  most  lifeless 
principles  behind  which  religion  could  possibly  mask  itself. 
Even  the  pious  emotions  are  so  evidently  a  fraud  that  the  or- 
ganic cardiac  response  must  be  unconsciously  called  in  to  give 
support  to  the  emotional  deception  and  the  plethora  forms  a 
sufficient  symbol  for  the  fulness  of  pious  faith  and  ardor  and 
desire.  Like  most  such  justified  compromises  it  conceals  at  the 
same  time  that  other  fulness  of  the  pockets,  the  greedy  stuf- 
fing with  worldly  wealth,  which  stops  not  even  at  the  children's 
poor  boxes  nor  at  the  saving  of  pins  in  the  lapel  of  his  coat. 

Another  of  the  three  coplotters  is  the  man  of  the  present. 
His  interests  are  too  widely  and  flutteringly  dispersed  for  us 
to  expect  any  great  things  of  him,  those  things  which  are 
accomplished  by  sincere  effective  endeavor.  He  too  has  his  mis- 
placed reactions.  He  belongs  in  "  almost  any  time "  and  is 
engaged  in  almost  any  enterprise.  Just  now  true  to  nothing 
better  than  a  hysterical  busybody  impulse,  the  war  and  the 
flag  are  his  concern.  Perhaps  it  is  his  ability  to  keep  his  eye 
a  little  more  upon  the  outer  world,  though  in  such  helter  skel- 
ter fashion,  which  at  least  gives  him  his  symptomatic  disturb- 
ance on  a  somewhat  different  plane  though  it  fails  to  bring 
the  ease  and  satisfaction  of  well  placed  toil.  So  it  is  his  spine 
that  finally  protests.  Something  in  his  sensorimotor  apparatus 
would  surely  have  to  go  wrong  with  such  a  misguided,  ill  di- 
rected zeal. 

Mary  Bliss,  enveloped  in  the  expectancy  of  dreams  coming 
true,  engages  herself  above  stairs  in  her  devotions,  unsuspecting 
of  the  plotting  against  her  among  these  hypocritical  friends 
who  grumblingly  enjoy  her  hospitality.  She  is  not  completely 
unsuspecting,  however,  but  in  her  self  effacement  and  unworld- 
liness  tries  to  attribute  what  she  might  make  ground  for  sus- 
picion only  to  the  excess  of  zeal  and  kindliness  toward  her. 
She  looks  down,  while  at  her  devotions  in  the  small  oratory 
above,  upon  Julia,  the  final  accomplice  of  the  friends  below 
stairs.  Julia  has  to  strain  even  at  the  ready  rationalism  of  pious 
and  disinterested  motives  to  justify  to  the  assembled  group, 
when  she  joins  them,  the  reading  of  Mary  Bliss's  private  diary. 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  87 

There  in  pages  of  loving  devotion  expressed  to  the  Lord,  for 
whose  coming  Mary  Bliss  awaits,  Julia  has  found  with  ready 
eagerness  food  for  scandal  and  ground  for  drastic  action.  Such 
action  is  given  the  thinnest  veneer  of  pious  concern  for  the 
aged  friend's  soul.  It  is  in  reality  a  scandalously  overt  scheme 
to  obtain  from  her  through  her  religious  susceptibility  the 
worldly  and  mercenary  advantage  for  which  the  others  are 
more  covertly  working.  Julia's  envy,  hatred,  narrowminded 
uncleanness  of  soul  scarcely  find  a  semblance  of  concealment. 
She  conspicuously  projects  upon  another,  here  the  most  simply 
pure  and  innocent,  the  dark  imaginings  and  strugglings  of  her 
own  nature.  These  she  is  too  petty  to  bring  to  any  victorious 
adjustment  within  herself,  and  so  she  becomes  the  type  of  a 
cavilling  world,  of  the  men  and  women  who  are  too  self 
blinded,  too  indolent,  too  safe  in  their  own  conceits  to  value 
either  themselves  or  their  neighbors  in  their  actual  strength  and 
weakness,  in  the  light  of  sincere  purpose.  Instead  Julia,  like 
them,  falls  quickly  and  easily  into  conventional  verbal  con- 
demnation, and  suggests  a  false  and  insincere  remedy  of  the 
same  sort. 

Therefore  she  is  most  ready  with  her  highly  developed 
scheme  for  the  saving  of  Mary  Bliss's  soul,  and  incidentally 
securing  control  of  her  wealth.  Here  enters  an  element  of 
the  crudest  and  crassest  attempt  to  define  and  handle  human 
nature  without  the  least  attempt  to  come  first  to  an  understand- 
ing of  it.  It  is  an  exaggeration  of  one  of  those  wholesale 
attempts  to  crowd  out  the  variety,  complexity,  depth  of  human 
nature,  by  the  enlargement  of  one  point  of  view  concerning  it. 
The  result  owes  its  grotesqueness  to  the  failure  to  realize  the 
reality  of  human  nature,  not  alone  its  manifoldness  and  indi- 
vidual variety  of  struggle  and  effort,  but  the  depth  and  fulness 
of  that  struggle,  which  is  based  upon  the  presence  of  the  pro- 
foundly fundamental  elements  which  constitute  human  nature. 
Tommy  Trail  stands  for  such  a  hollow  conventionalized  form 
of  religion.  He  indulges  in  condemnatory  revilings,  uproar- 
ious vituperations  and  blasting  dogmatisms  which  are  but  re- 
sounding words.  They  are  merely  splashed  with  a  trifle  of 


88  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

maudlin  sentimentality  and  also  serve  to  cover  from  the  per- 
petrator of  such  preaching  as  well  as  from  those  moved  to 
hear  him  a  true  understanding  of  the  growth  and  evolution  of 
a  human  soul  through  its  very  weaknesses  and  conflicts  up  to 
light  and  life.  Dafty,  the  slyly  quiet  and  merry  one,  knows 
more  of  this  really  spiritual  religion. 

The  Tommy  Trail  introduced  to  mark  the  extreme  travesty 
of  a  religion  which  seeks  more  to  hide  and  conceal  the  true 
struggle  and  evolution  of  man  than  to  recognize  it  and  give 
it  scope,  knows  nothing  of  the  titanic  struggle  between  good 
and  evil,  out  of  which  good  is  naturally  born.  His  religion' 
kills  where  it  would  make  alive.  It  finds  in  the  excesses  of 
its  religious  belief  and  the  seeming  ardor  of  its  expression  and 
effect  a  blinding  disguise  to  the  very  things  it  most  condemns. 
Better  the  more  frankly  enjoyed  mingling  of  the  sensuous  and 
delightful  with  a  devoted  ardor  of  worship  and  service  as  that 
manifest  in  Mary  Bliss  and  her  happy  orphan  group,  whom 
this  latter  day  religion  comes  to  save,  or  here  evidently  to  rob. 

The  mockery  lies  in  the  introduction  of  this  figure  but  it 
speaks  also  in  the  exaggerated  form  of  religion  which  masks 
itself  against  the  pure  and  undefined  religion  of  the  heart.  The 
latter  seeks  its  truth  sincerely  though  it  may  be  mistakenly  and 
with  wanderings  from  the  truth.  And  yet  too  many  people  are 
glad  to  pull  such  roughened  wool  over  their  eyes,  rather  than 
boldly  and  industriously  to  examine  their  own  hearts  and  see 
whither  they  tend.  Otherwise  might  they  see  too  the  selfish- 
nesses, pettinesses,  angers,  backbitings,  seeking  for  gain,  or 
sourness  of  self  centered  disposition,  which  here  forces  itself 
to  notice  in  petted  physical  ailments  or  in  the  mean  spirited 
plotting  in  the  name  of  science  and  religious  fervor. 

The  soul  of  Mary  Bliss  is  filled  with  loving  thought  of  her 
Lord  and  the  news  of  his  expected  coming  in  Tommy  Trail,  as 
her  friends  have  arranged  it,  falls  upon  her  expectant  spirit  with 
a  joy  that  sets  her  dreams  vibrating  with  a  marvelous  prefigured 
reality.  The  expectancy  has  power  even  to  transform  her  out- 
ward appearance  and  correct  the  encroaching  feebleness  of 
years.  So  thoroughly  have  her  dreams  assured  her  that  it  is 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  89 

long  before  the  cruel  truth  of  the  hideously  planned  attack  upon 
her  manner  of  life  with  its  confidence  and  trust  penetrates  her 
understanding.  Her  dreams  have  caused  such  a  childlike 
reliance  upon  the  greater  judgment  of  others,  that  in  all 
humility  she  attributes  the  unexpectedly  disillusioning  appear- 
ance of  the  expected  visitor  to  pass  as  her  own  misunderstanding. 
The  raucousness  of  speech,  sentiment  and  manner  of  the 
preacher  fall  at  first  upon  an  averted  listener,  timid,  tremulous, 
waiting  if  she  may  discern  something  in  this  her  Lord  which 
will  answer  to  her  love  and  longing  and  consecration. 

It  is  a  rude  awakening  when  she  discovers  how  she  has  been 
unwittingly  deceived.  No  one  had  planned  it  just  so;  Mary 
Bliss  and  the  conspirators  had  been  working  at  cross  purposes. 
Each  thought  the  other  understood,  Mary  who  had  been  mis- 
takenly led  to  believe  that  the  Lord  for  whom  she  watched 
"  at  evening,  or  at  cock  crowing,  or  in  the  morning  "  had  surely 
come,  and  the  plotters,  who  thought  she  had  somehow  got  wind 
of  the  famous  modern  preacher,  Tommy  Trail,  who  would  drag 
her  out  of  hell  with  his  fire  and  brimstone  methods,  in  which 
all  love  and  beauty  and  grace  were  utterly  lacking. 

Nevertheless  the  awaking  is  also  a  more  real  one  than  they 
had  planned.  Her  dreams  have  been  violently  shaken,  but  in 
their  stead  she  has  learned  the  wholesomeness  of  a  little  doubt 
and  question.  She  knows  now  that  there  is  a  better  and 
stronger  way  for  the  soul  to  reach  out  for  itself  and  find  and 
make  its  truth.  Love  and  adoration  and  blissful  expectancy 
are  not  enough  for  the  inner  life  of  man  or  woman.  No  less 
do  all  things  belong  in  the  symphony  of  life,  the  merry,  the 
gay,  the  worldly  and  the  contemplative,  and  none  so  widely 
separated  as  our  conventional  religion,  the  hard  bitter  cavilling 
sort,  would  leave  us  to  believe,  but  they  must  be  diffused  with 
more  of  the  sterner  sense  of  reality.  There  is  room  and  ne- 
cessity for  question  and  doubt,  for  the  serpent's  wise  activity. 
The  Hebrew  and  Christian  religions  have  magnified  too  ex- 
clusively the  guile  and  subtle  evil  of  the  serpent.  Other 
religions  have  given  more  attention  to  its  cleverness,  activity, 
power,  the  ceaseless  activity  and  creative  vitality  symbolized 


9O  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

through  him.  Though  Christ  made  reference  to  this  his  fol- 
lowers have  laid  little  stress  upon  it,  but  Mary  Bliss  is  ready 
now  to  add  such  subtlety  and  assiduity  to  her  dovelike  ac- 
ceptance of  life's  dreams  and  through  them  of  the  impositions 
of  her  friends.  It  is  not  enough,  she  has  come  to  realize,  to 
sit  and  passively  receive  wounds  and  hurts  and  adulations  alike, 
or  even  to  lose  oneself  in  the  rapturous  devotion  of  worship 
and  the  mere  joyous  service  which  this  calls  forth.  She  too 
is  coming  closer  into  the  heart  of  a  reality  as  it  finds  itself 
in  this  mixed  world,  this  petty,  divided,  sordid  humanity,  which 
yet  struggles  and  strives.  Now  her  return  to  youth  and 
strength  becomes  lasting  and  complete,  and  she  even  comes  in 
a  closer,  truer  sympathy  to  sour  Job  suffering  by  the  fire.  She 
takes  the  world  just  as  it  is,  out  of  its  dreams,  while  still  not 
losing  its  dreams,  and  realizes  the  need  of  each  individual.  She 
comes  closer  to  weaknesses  and  uglinesses,  to  strength  and 
beauty,  with  that  truly  sympathetic  touch  which  stimulates  to 
new  life  for  these  and  crowds  out  those  by  stimulating  to  a 
life  of  vigor  and  worthy  ambition.  This  Mary  Bliss  was 
roused  to  feel  and  in  such  a  spirit  she  drew  more  truly  nearer 
her  companion  than  in  all  the  generous  but  indulgent  courtesy 
with  which  she  had  formerly  greeted  these  misguided  friends. 

It  must  however  be  Dafty  who  finally  enforces  the  lesson 
and  with  his  flaming  sword,  gilt  paper  toy  though  it  is,  rouses 
them  from  death  to  life.  Here  again  is  a  return  to  the  truth 
that  the  beginnings  of  all  power  and  aspiration,  all  spiritualiza- 
tion  are  far,  far  below,  basic,  simple,  earthy,  childish.  Dafty 
knows  this  truth  and  how  salvation  is  wrought,  how  eternal 
life  is  found.  Dafty,  the  "  man  out  of  time,"  has  passed 
through  hell  up  to  heaven.  He  has  tried  the  ways  of  these 
men  before  him,  he  has  suffered  the  penalty  of  narrow  sordid 
self  seeking,  the  penalty  which  caused  ages  of  experience  in 
growth  and  development,  slow  upward  climbing  to  victory.  He 
knows  it  is  not  attained  by  thunderous  accusations  which  hurl 
one  portion  of  the  race  to  final  perdition,  nor  self  blinded  ac- 
clamations which  fix  one  narrow  way  of  salvation  for  a  selected 
few.  Neither  is  it  found  in  dreams.  Dafty  represents  the  race 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  9! 

of  no  time,  of  all  time,  the  timelessness  which  cannot  even  stop 
its  evolutionary  process  to  mark  time.  He  stands  for  the  cease- 
less effort  of  humanity  to  struggle  and  work  from  the  indis- 
tinctness and  vagueness  of  early  creation,  through  the  mistakes 
and  wanderings  and  clumsiness  of  all  effort,  particularly  human 
effort  with  its  wider  possibilities  both  of  accomplishment  and 
of  straying,  up  to  an  even  clearer  light,  to  a  greater  power, 
to  a  more  perfect,  harmonious  and  effectual  adjustment  within 
itself  and  in  the  world  of  environment  and  opportunity  about 
it.  This  is  life.  It  is  growth,  evolution,  creative  evolution. 
This  outlives  and  finally  dissolves  and  wipes  away  the  petti- 
nesses, personal  faults  and  personal  grievances,  which  are  the 
partialities.  These  stand  in  the  way  of  the  vision  of  the  whole 
and  the  ever  receding  because  ever  growing  heaven  of  salvation 
just  beyond.  So  Dafty  preaches  the  salvation  which  lies  in 
learning  here  and  now  thus  to  live  and  strive  toward  the  greater 
and  to  grow  beyond  the  smallnesses. 

Yet  because  this  grows  with  our  growth  it  is  not  to  be 
grasped  in  visions  from  above.  It  does  not  come  streaming 
down  through  Mary  Bliss's  angel  window  of  glory  before  which 
she  stands  waiting,  nor  yet  in  her  hours  of  meditation  and 
prayer.  These  are  necessary  from  time  to  time,  in  some  form 
or  another,  in  order  to  keep  the  vision  just  a  little  way  before 
the  striving  and  in  order  to  speak  out  faster  than  slow  effort 
can  bring  to  pass  the  unquenchable  yearning  and  hope  toward 
something  better.  Even  the  greed  for  other's  people's  money 
or  the  angry  petted  liver  can  only  partially  conceal  this.  Yet 
the  vision  itself  comes  from  the  smaller  beginnings  which  are 
our  own.  They  arise  of  the  trivial,  the  childish  and  the  earthy 
and  grow  with  our  growth.  So  Dafty's  sham  sword,  made 
for  the  children's  fete,  is  after  all  a  fit  symbol  for  the  arousing 
to  seriousness  and  to  life  of  those  dead  and  dying  individuali- 
ties who  were  allowing  themselves  to  stifle  in  the  narrowness 
of  their  points  of  view.  Tommy  Trail,  who  is  at  last  depicted 
wrapped  in  his  own  hellishly  pictured  accoutrements,  even  he 
begins  to  writhe  forth  and  to  live  in  a  new  and  wider  light 


92  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

upon  humanity.  An  undreamed  of  path  of  true  humble  activity 
begins  to  take  the  place  of  the  crude  and  boastful  threatenings 
which  had  only  served  to  block  the  way  toward  everything 
but  the  death  and  destruction  he  had  preached. 

Thus  the  play  leaves  them  just  awakened  at  last  to  the  first 
flush  of  comprehension  that  there  is  a  different  way  to  attain 
life  and  its  satisfaction.  The  narrow  schemes  are  turned  by 
the  clever  Dafty  back  upon  the  promoters  of  them.  The  scales 
begin  to  fall  and  they  begin  as  little  children  to  see  the  way 
to  walk  on  a  path  that  widens  out  to  a  boundless  prospect  of 
living.  Barely  is  this  suggested  to  the  different  personalities. 
There  is  at  first  only  the  astonishment  of  the  new  awakening, 
hardly  yet  supplanting  the  fear  occasioned  by  the  closing  in 
of  the  trifling,  self  contracted  schemes  of  each  one.  The  life 
that  unfolds  from  within,  which  with  Dafty  has  come  up 
through  all  time,  carries  with  it  all  the  store  of  the  ages  of 
past  experience  of  trying  and  failing  and  succeeding,  of  sinning 
and  of  suffering,  of  hope  in  dreams  and  hope  passing  into 
the  realization  of  action  and  achievement.  This  all  proves  to 
lie  behind  the  partial  divisions,  which  we  in  our  superficial 
blindness,  like  the  characters  of  the  play,  have  believed  constitute 
the  whole  of  life. 

The  very  long  course  of  salvation,  of  good  and  of  evil, 
of  passage  from  death  unto  life  lies  in  the  full  measure  of 
life  as  conscious  and  unconscious,  some  above  the  surface  where 
we  habitually  view  it,  much  preserved  below  our  ordinary  con- 
scious awareness,  preserved  as  the  record  and  accumulation 
of  past  experience,  individual  and  racial.  Life  must  go  on 
climbing  from  sphere  to  sphere,  from  its  hells  to  its  heavens, 
surrounded  by  dreams,  as  it  still  takes  account  of  the  glow  of  the 
past,  and  as  it  throws  this  radiance  ahead  to  stimulate  us  toward 
a  future  of  progress.  And  this  can  come  only  through  a 
present  conflict  of  forces.  The  Dafties  are  within  us  carrying 
their  swords  of  simple  beginnings,  of  childish  possessions,  of 
means  of  conflict  and  of  achievement  drawn  from  this  world, 
the  simpler,  lower  experiences  through  which  the  pathway  has 


THE  MEETING  OF  EXTREMES  93 

lain,  through  which  it  still  lies.  Each  effort,  each  petty  striving, 
yes,  each  narrow  fault  and  sin,  if  it  seeks  its  place  and  its 
regeneration  in  this  wholeness  of  life,  may  lay  claim  to  the 
song  of  triumph  and  love  with  which  Mary  Bliss  praises  her 
Lord  for  the  victory  which  she  discovered  lies  in  this  life. 
"  Clear  as  the  sun,  fair  as  the  moon  and  terrible  as  an  army 
with  banners,"  such  a  Church  looks  forth  in  the  morning  light. 


CHAPTER    VII 
COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  x 

Freedom  is  synonymous  with  perfect  health,  and  either  de- 
notes the  goal  of  human  striving.  Both  mark  a  return  to  the 
conception  embodied  in  the  literal  meaning  of  health  as  the 
wholeness  of  man,  which  alone  is  perfect  freedom.  This  is 
not  the  irresponsible  liberty  to  do  that  which  brings  immediate 
pleasure  or  gain,  unmindful  of  social  duty  or  accountability,  of 
one's  relations  to  a  society  ordered  toward  the  greatest  good  of 
the  greatest  whole.  It  is  rather  that  freedom  by  which  all  one's 
powers  are  best  directed  toward  progressive  ends  and  man  has 
found  through  ages  of  trial  and  error  that  these  are  communal 
ends.  Such  freedom,  bound  to  the  social  group  in  racial  service, 
in  reality  releases  man  from  fetters  which  cut  him  off  from 
his  fullest  powers  and  opportunities.  Contrary  to  a  selfish 
liberty,  it  sets  and  keeps  these  powers  free  for  that  fullness 
of  service  which  is  creative  achievement  and  grants  him  his 
place  in  the  steady  advance  upon  which  the  race  long  ago  em- 
barked. 

Curtailing  of  freedom  does  not  lie  in  external  restriction  and 
the  limitation  set  by  the  differences  and  misunderstandings  of 
the  social  group.  These  after  all  are  but  the  stimulus  and  chal- 
lenge to  the  really  free  soul.  Fetters  are  rather  within,  self 
forged,  though  often  unwittingly  so.  "  Oh  wretched  man  that 
I  am,  who  shall  deliver  me  from  the  body  of  this  death?"  The 
physician  is  intent  upon  this  cry  as  it  comes  daily  to  his  ears. 
He  knows  well  that  the  inner  disease,  however  slightly  it  is 
sapping  the  strength  and  limiting  the  ability  of  his  patient  to 
take  up  the  free  and  effective  work  which  is  abundantly  at 
hand,  or  however  great  the  inroads  it  makes  into  the  inherent 

1  Printed  in  the  Psychoanalytic  Review,  Vol.  V,  No.  3,  July,  1918.  J. 
H.  Benrimo  and  George  C.  Hazelton:  The  Willow  Tree. 

94 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  95 

right  of  man  to  swing  freely  into  the  current  of  progressive 
thought  and  action  —  such  disease  is  bondage  to  some  inner 
weakness,  insufficiency,  ineffectualness.  A  vital  psychology,  which 
seeks  to  cope  with  this  larger  problem  of  man's  adjustment  to 
the  demands  of  life,  in  which  lie  freedom  and  health,  is  still 
more  keenly  aware  of  this  question  of  relative  freedom  and 
bondage,  which  condition  man's  success.  For  this  is  that  sort 
of  success  that  manifests  itself  in  the  buoyant  power  of  accom- 
plishment winning  its  way  from  one  goal  of  activity  to  another. 
Such  psychology  sees  likewise  the  compelling  force  of  inner 
inhibitions  and  restraints,  at  least  the  painful  results  and  mani- 
festations of  these  are  evident  and  awaken  the  question  whether 
one's  bondage  is  not  in  fact  only  from  within.  Are  not  inner 
psychical  fetters  the  only  chains  that  really  bind  the  spirit  and 
interfere  with  health  and  achievement? 

Obsession,  compulsion,  these  terms  are  familiar  in  special 
mental  conditions  where  freedom  is  markedly  curtailed  and  acute 
suffering  ensues.  There  is  still  failure  to  realize  however  how 
such  inner  conditions,  which  are  thus  recognized  in  flagrant 
pathological  form,  are  dominant  in  still  lesser  form,  perhaps  to 
some  degree  in  every  human  life.  The  knowledge  and  power 
of  observation  of  the  physician  grow  to  include  many  border- 
land cases,  and  those  in  which  only  slight  deviation  or  peculiarity 
marks  a  restriction  of  normal  power.  These  are  finding  a  wider, 
more  comprehensively  human  classification,  both  better  under- 
standing of  symptomatic  manifestation  and  explanation  for  the 
same,  and  also  a  sympathetic  comprehension  of  them  as  but 
differing  degrees  of  the  same  struggle,  endeavor  and  partial 
success,  which  pervade  all  society,  all  forms  of  activity,  all  vari- 
eties of  life's  pursuits. 

The  wider  training  and  fuller  initiation  into  such  an  attitude 
of  understanding,  appreciation  and  ability  to  guide  to  a  healthy 
freedom,  which  are  coming  to  be  demanded  of  every  social 
worker,  urge  him  to  look  about  him  constantly  alert  and  re- 
ceptive to  all  that  can  reveal  human  nature  in  its  manifold 
phases.  He  must  see  these  as  but  varying  expressions  of  the 
underlying  unity  of  striving,  effort,  longing,  disturbed  and 


96  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

thwarted  by  these  inner  fetters  which  alone  constitute  disease 
and  bondage,  and  thus  condition  ineffectualness,  failure  and 
even  death.  Such  an  one  therefore  at  his  daily  work,  the  physi- 
cian in  the  presence  of  disease  in  its  more  distinctive  forms, 
or  either  at  his  recreation,  where  through  art  and  beauty,  gaiety 
and  frivolity,  it  is  still  human  life  in  its  trials  and  errors,  its 
successes  and  failures,  that  is  depicted,  is  coming  to  wider  ac- 
quaintance, keener  discernment  and  more  thorough  penetration 
and  comprehension  of  just  these  human  problems.  Indeed  the 
theater,  presenting  as  it  does  the  artist's  intuitive  knowledge  of 
the  unconscious,  which  lies  behind  the  scattered  phenomena 
which  we  are  accustomed  to  call  the  mental  life  of  man,  affords 
oftentimes  the  surest  entrance  into  the  profound  regions  of  the 
human  psyche.  There  lie  the  unseen  fetters,  and  veiled  in  the 
language  and  setting  of  art,  the  difficulties  which  beset  every 
life  are  revealed,  while  artistic  skill  discovers  and  points  also 
the  way  of  release  out  into  freedom  and  health. 

The  Willow  Tree  is  a  play  of  such  rare  delicacy  of  treatment 
that  superficially  one  might  miss  its  excursion  into  these  secret 
and  often  somber  depths  of  the  psychical  life,  did  not  the  final 
sacrifice  grip  the  inner  soul  with  an  answering  response  of  the 
necessity  as  well  as  the  beauty  of  such  self  effacing  devotion. 
What  is  the  compulsion  which  has  made  this  necessary,  which 
silently  convinces  each  spectator  of  the  same  inescapable  de- 
mand for  a  supremacy  of  self  denial,  which  for  the  princess, 
though  she  abounds  in  the  joy  of  life,  ends  not  in  freedom  but 
in  death?  Why  is  human  nature  thus  compelled,  and  freedom 
for  one  attained  only  by  the  complete  vanquishment  of  another? 

Some  analysis  of  this  "  Fantasy  of  Old  Japan  "  will  perhaps 
bring  a  sympathetic  insight  into  the  compulsion  which  is  at 
work  to  a  greater  or  less  extent  in  every  psyche,  preventing 
the  complete  exercise  of  one's  powers,  not  always  with  patho- 
logical distinctiveness,  but  with  just  so  much  limitation,  suffering 
and  actual  acute  loss  of  power,  opportunity,  or  life  itself.  Thus 
every  life  is  limited.  So  accustomed  to  this  has  mankind  been, 
and  also  so  rationalized  into  a  complacent  disavowal  of  his  own 
accountability  toward  such  a  state  of  affairs,  that  his  ages  of 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  97 

culture,  his  systems  of  religion,  his  individual  ethics  and  morali- 
ties have  been  based  upon  a  blind  acceptance  of  it  in  the  terms 
in  which  it  is  upheld  and  interpretated,  those  of  inexorable  fate, 
inscrutable  providence,  or  an  inevitable  subordination  of  the 
individual  to  heredity  and  environment.  Only  recently  has  it 
become  a  matter  of  serious  practical  concern  to  investigate  man's 
own  individual  psyche  and  discover  and  release  the  chains  forged 
there,  it  may  be  by  heredity  and  by  early  circumstances,  but 
still  individual  fetters  capable  of  release  from  their  inherent  com- 
pulsion. If  it  is  possible  thus  to  attain  at  least  a  greater 
freedom  for  a  fuller  life,  with  a  greater  intensity  of  achievement, 
if  not  an  actual  extension  of  the  years  of  active  life  through 
such  release,  every  insight  into  the  heart  of  man  should  be 
welcomed,  that  truest  artistic  insight  from  the  theater  as  not 
the  least  of  these. 

There  is,  this  "  Fantasy  "  tells  us,  a  "  wish  in  the  heart  of 
a  man,"  to  which  indeed  life  owes  its  inspiration  and  aspiration, 
but  to  it  also  its  entanglements  and  bondage.  For  the  way 
to  realize  the  wish  is  not  unhindered.  The  wish  must  for  the 
sake  of  greater  gains  conform  to  other  men,  to  that  very  society 
which  the  instinct  of  man  has  constructed  about  his  wish  to 
give  it  security  and  opportunity,  and  which  therefore  sets  to 
it  certain  inevitable  limits.  This  is  not  an  imposed  bondage 
of  compulsion,  but  in  the  nature  of  man,  because  his  wish  has 
not  learned  to  fit  the  ego  into  the  broader,  social  life  of  greater 
advantage,  the  compulsion  arises  both  out  of  the  effort  to  realize 
without  restraint  his  ego  wish  and  the  necessity  of  curtailing 
and  redirecting  that  wish  in  conformity  to  his  social,  cultural 
position.  The  ego  blazons  forth,  is  rebuffed  through  the  very 
fear  of  itself,  retreats,  hedges  itself  round  by  all  manner  of 
defense,  rationalization,  fear,  inefficiency,  the  wish  still  strong 
within  it,  but  unable  through  the  defensive  fear  and  taboo  which 
it  has  created  to  find  its  way  over  into  that  sublimation  which 
marks  the  higher  freedom.  And  it  misses  thus,  through  its  self 
made  limitation,  that  increase  and  enlargement  which  the  wish, 
spurning  the  early  egoistic  path,  might  have  found  on  the  more 
open  and  effective  paths  leading  to  the  plane  of  sublimation, 
and  advancing  this  again. 


98  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

Hamilton,  the  hero  of  the  play,  has  lost  his  freedom.  Ap- 
parently he  has  entered  a  life  of  easy  indolence  and  irresponsi- 
bility. He  is  free  from  the  sordid  interests  and  futile  pursuits 
of  the  restless,  feverish  Occident  and  has  sunk  into  a  manner 
of  life  which  appeals  to  his  inner  nature  and  permits  a  freedom 
of  moods  and  dreams,  which  lie  close  to  the  wish  within  his 
heart.  London  had  rent  his  inner  nature.  His  love  was  engaged 
there  but  it  had  to  be  lived  out  in  terms  of  establishment  and 
the  artificialities  of  motor  cars  and  social  display,  the  standards  of 
creature  comforts  and  external  advantage.  The  woman  of  his 
choice  stood  for  this  phase  of  existence  and  felt  her  life  to  be 
impossible  without  these  things.  His  nature,  recoiling  from  this 
superficial  approach,  unable  to  master  such  forms  of  reality  and 
yet  not  willing  to  be  enslaved  by  them,  flees  from  reality  itself, 
turning  instinctively  to  the  heart  of  phantasy  for  its  escape.  The 
Oriental  languor  and  indolence  of  his  remote  garden  retreat 
are  concealed  under  a  simplicity  which  gives  them  a  specious 
justification  to  this  man,  sickened  by  the  superficial  unsatisfac- 
toriness  of  the  life  he  has  left.  It  is  a  veritable  toyland  garden 
into  which  he  has  withdrawn.  The  seclusion  of  a  tiny  cottage 
in  far  Japan  in  its  miniature  setting,  where  bright  flowers  are 
blooming  and  small  fountains  trickling,  is  a  far  more  fitting 
environment  for  his  retirement  into  phantasy  than  the  conscious 
acceptance  of  such  an  ideal  retreat  could  admit.  It  is  the  un- 
conscious child  seeking  peace,  comfort,  even  the  self  inflicted 
pain  of  nursing  its  grief  and  disappointment,  which  falls  back 
thus  easily  to  the  arms  of  phantasy,  to  the  mother  image  eter- 
nally hidden  in  the  heart  of  man.  There  he  dreams  and  dwells 
in  the  unreality  of  his  ideal  world,  and  there  he  hangs  his  verses 
upon  the  willow  tree. 

Reality  however  with  watchful  saving  grace  comes  keen-eyed 
and  seeks  out  those  who  have  only  let  the  immortal  purpose  of 
life  become  obscured.  Even  while  they  dream  she  touches  un- 
awares, through  the  dreams  even,  the  truer  impulse  and  quickens 
it  into  response.  Hamilton  makes  verses  to  the  rain  god  and 
these  give  the  first  low  rumbling  promise  of  an  awakening  ac- 
tivity, and  bring  their  own  salvation  though  this  activity  is 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  99 

hardly  more  yet  than  a  phantastic  childish  indulgence.  The 
unconscious  depths,  harboring  place  of  all  the  instincts  and  im- 
pulses of  the  human  race,  though  crowded  with  often  hindering 
and  inhibiting  emotions,  affects,  contain  yet  within  them,  stim- 
ulated and  inspired  by  these  same  affects,  the  unquenchable 
impulse  to  power  and  self  expression,  which  is  the  creative 
instinct.  Active  impulse  and  conditioning  affect  urge  him  in 
very  fact  to  impersonate  the  rain  god  of  ancient  mythology. 
All  mythology  attests  to  the  unconscious  association  of  the 
mother  with  the  heart  of  the  tree  and  her  localization  there. 
Myths  of  birth  from  the  tree  confront  us  in  the  legends  of  such 
remote  lands  and  cultures  as  those  of  ancient  Greece  and  the 
islands  of  Oceanica.  That  most  human  of  the  religions  of  an- 
tiquity, which  moved  the  heart  of  ancient  Egypt,  devoted  a 
solemn  ceremonial  to  the  representation  of  its  beloved  god  Osiris 
lying  among  the  branches  of  the  sycamore  tree  to  commemorate 
his  birth  from  his  mother  Nut.  Nor  is  there  wanting  similar 
abundant  evidence  of  the  power  of  the  rain  god  over  Mother 
Earth,  the  strife  with  the  heaven  god  in  this  capacity  as  the 
son  seeks  to  replace  him,  which  is  the  concrete  though  uncon- 
scious struggle  of  each  individual  to  find  in  this  manner  com- 
plete power  and  satisfaction  with  the  mother. 

This  his  phantasy  may  be  his  destruction,  if  the  infantile  wish 
controls  until  it  overpowers  him.  Therefore  the  hard  world 
of  reality  speaks  opportunely  in  the  voice  of  the  sincere  and 
earnest  Geoffrey,  warning  his  friend  against  the  madness  toward 
which  this  tends.  This  friend,  however,  type  of  blind  self  de- 
fending rationalization,  comes  with  eyes  quite  darkened  to  the 
reality  that  lies  in  the  dream,  where  after  all  the  undying  im- 
pulse arises  and  advances  to  its  own  out  of  the  source  of 
pleasure  phantasy.  The  young  rain  god,  because  he  is  the 
embodiment  of  the  creative  impulse,  cannot  remain  satisfied  with 
the  mere  dream  of  nearness  to  the  mother.  The  phantasied 
prayer  does  not  suffice ;  he  must  write  out  his  poem,  "  rather 
good  poem,  too,  Geoffrey,  I  was  rather  proud  of  it."  And  so  in 
the  pride  of  his  creative  effort  he  unconsciously  rises  from  the 
mother  image  toward  his  own  salvation. 


IOO  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

It  is  then  that  the  embodiment  of  the  mother  wish,  renewed 
in  the  form  that  leads  away  upon  the  path  of  sublimation,  comes 
to  him  with  more  than  the  marvel  of  his  fondest  dreams.  The 
truest  presentation  of  the  reverse  of  the  mother-son  wish,  seek- 
ing to  escape  its  chrysalis  of  phantasy,  necessitates  that  the 
father  shall  bring  this  mother  reincarnation,  the  younger  woman 
made  in  the  mother  image,  but  herelf  young  and  fair  and  there- 
fore true  object  for  sublimation  and  freedom  through  it.  It  is 
the  father  heart  that  has  given  her  birth,  rediscovered  and  re- 
created her  in  the  mother  image,  from  the  mother  willow  by 
his  power  of  love.  This  lies  in  an  old  man,  type  of  the  ancient 
life  of  Japan,  who  has  carved  from  cedar  wood,  and  ivory  and 
jade  an  image,  the  image  of  the  Princess  of  the  Willow  Tree, 
which  to  his  love  seems  almost  to  be  alive.  Could  he  believe 
himself  a  more  worthy  carver,  he  believes  that  the  woman  em- 
bodied there  would  certainly  live  again  under  his  hands. 

He  knows  full  well  the  parent's  reluctance  to  give  her  to 
the  hand  of  another.  Yet  the  "  dim  old  eyes  "  looking  out  of 
the  far  mist  of  the  past,  this  old  man  "  five  hundred  years  older 
than  his  son,"  who  in  his  haste  with  the  gifts  of  the  world  has 
made  only  cheap  contact  with  reality — these  eyes  have  the  vision 
of  the  past  and  of  the  future  that  lies  within  it. 

They  are  the  eyes  that  look  through  the  old  tale  from  its 
farther  side  in  the  legendary  past  out  into  the  need  and  demand 
of  present  activity  and  duty.  His  narrative  of  the  Legend  of 
the  Princess  of  the  Willow  Tree  is  more  than  a  prophecy,  for  it 
is  his  own  soul's  history  and  that  is  the  eternal  conflict  and 
victory.  He  has  felt  the  price  of  that  progress  which  is  freedom, 
life,  the  immortality  of  the  race.  With  determined  mastery  of 
the  trembling  which  marks  the  depth  of  sacrifice  demanded 
of  the  parent,  aging  and  passing  on,  he  recites  the  legend  which 
yields  to  the  younger  man  the  object  of  his  seeking,  which  is 
to  be  to  him  at  the  same  time  his  salvation  through  the  losing 
of  itself  for  his  freedom.  Thus  again  the  eternal  paradox,  which 
is  only  the  never  ending  alternation  which  Jung  has  told  us 
must  always  lie  beneath  life  to  keep  it  moving  now  and  ever 
toward  its  goal  of  progress  but  with  the  also  ever  recurring 
rebirth  from  the  fountain  both  of  pleasure  and  of  life. 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  IOI 

He  relates  to  Hamilton,  who  becomes  the  purchaser  of  the 
Image,  the  tale  of  the  Princess  of  the  Willow  Tree,  a  beautiful 
old  legend  from  the  "  days  of  the  mists  of  the  dawn  of  history," 
who  smilingly  sacrificed  all  for  love.  In  that  olden  time  a 
general  had  fallen  under  the  displeasure  of  the  Mikado  and 
was  sent  into  banishment.  Near  his  cabin  where  he  dwelt  grew  a 
willow  tree  and  from  it  had  appeared  to  him  the  beautiful  woman 
who  dwelt  at  its  heart.  She  had  lived  with  him  and  loved 
him  until  one  day  she  learned  that  he  had  been  summoned  once 
more  to  Japan  to  save  her  from  her  enemies,  and  to  marry 
the  Mikado's  daughter,  but  had  refused  to  leave  her.  Volun- 
tarily she  removes  the  obstacle  of  her  presence  from  his  path  by 
begging  that  the  willow  tree,  symbol  and  source  of  her  life,  shall 
be  cut  down.  She  laughs  gaily  while  he  carries  out  her  wish 
and  still  laughing  disappears  from  his  sight  as  the  tree  falls. 
The  carved  image  the  old  workman  believes  to  be  a  portrait 
of  this  ancient  heroine,  reproduced  by  the  knowledge  which  his 
dreams  of  her  loveliness  have  imparted  to  his  hands.  He  leaves 
the  image  with  Hamilton  after  telling  him  half  reluctantly 
and  fearfully  of  the  old  Japanese  superstition  that  a  mirror, 
containing  as  it  does  the  soul  of  a  woman,  laid  in  the  bosom 
of  the  image  might  bring  her  to  life.  But  he  warns  Hamilton 
not  to  presume  to  use  thus  the  magic  of  the  gods. 

No  sooner  has  the  image  maker  departed  than  Hamilton  dares 
the  experiment  and  is  himself  spell-bound  to  see  the  image 
slowly  waking  to  life.  She  is  a  wondering  untouched  child 
woman,  innocent  of  the  ways  of  the  world  into  which  she  has 
stepped  and  dependent  upon  the  love  and  tenderness  of  Hamil- 
ton who  inducts  her  into  its  practical  everyday  concerns  and 
its  deeper  mysteries.  Underneath  this  simply  sweet  exterior  she 
has  however  all  the  depth  of  wisdom  which  makes  her  the  eternal 
soul  of  woman,  and  capable  in  the  end  of  the  supreme  sacrifice 
whereby  the  source  of  love  and  life,  the  mother  soul,  can  lay 
aside  all  the  delights  with  which  she  charms  and  the  reward 
of  pleasure  which  is  hers  through  them,  and  retire  again  from 
obstructing  the  man's  pathway  to  a  higher  and  broader  exercise 
of  life. 


IO2  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

Thus  attained  there  dawns  however  the  fulfilment  of  the 
hero's  bliss.  It  seems  supreme,  complete  at  last,  at  least  after 
he  has  finally  made  his  choice  between  this  tender  woman,  new- 
born, and  the  old  world  beyond,  which  once  more  in  the  person 
of  Mary  Temple,  the  woman  from  England,  directly  thrusts 
its  claims  upon  him.  Now  at  last  there  is  the  freedom  of  en- 
joyment, which  seems  to  restore  to  him  all  he  had  lost,  or 
seemed  to  have  lost  because  he  had  not  really  found  it  as  yet. 

His  is  the  delight  of  worship  of  the  lovely  creature,  father- 
created,  yet  in  truth  only  actually  brought  to  life  because  his 
faith  in  her  reality  exceeded  the  timidity  of  the  older  man, 
who  dared  not  put  the  mystery  to  the  test.  His  alone  was  the 
right  in  the  power  of  the  younger  man  to  call  her  into  being,  to 
breathe  the  breath  of  life — universal  impregnation  phantasy 
from  the  childhood  of  the  race1 — upon  the  mirror  which  should 
then  reflect  to  the  woman  all  that  her  living  soul  might  mean 
to  the  man  who  would  thus  give  life  to  her  and  then  take  this 
life  to  himself.  His  was  the  task,  moreover,  of  bringing  her 
to  a  knowledge  of  the  real  meaning  of  life  which  was  shared 
with  another,  lived  not  in  dreams  to  itself  alone.  His  masculine 
spirit  might  rejoice  in  its  creative  power  and  the  authority  which 
it  had  established  over  the  being  in  his  hands.  Yet  the  perfec- 
tion of  this  creature  no  less  than  her  innocent  helplessness  holds 
him  to  a  sense  of  his  responsibility.  The  limitation  of  his  right 
and  power  by  the  power  of  love  and  devotion  within  her  re- 
deems him  from  a  too  egoistic  goal  to  the  more  perfect  life 
of  mutual  adaptation  and  concession.  Already  she  is  winning 
for  him  a  freedom  from  the  inner  compulsion  which  belongs 
to  the  mother  fixation,  which  demands  that  all  shall  be  directed 
toward  the  pleasure  wish  of  the  infantile  egoism.  A  certain 
unconscious  incest  fear  is  also  a  barrier  against  this  and  sets 
up  some  of  the  restriction  which  tempers  the  relationship  toward 
this  embodiment  of  his  unconscious  ideal.  At  the  same  time, 
since  it  is  all  unconscious,  it  occasions  an  inner  conflict  with  the 

1  See  F.  L.  Wells :  A  Summary  of  Material  on  the  Topical  Community 
of  Primitive  and  Pathological  Symbols.  Psychoanalytic  Review,  Vol. 
IV,  No.  i,  January,  1917,  pp.  55-57. 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM 


103 


desire  itself,  which  makes  the  final  decision  toward  England 
and  duty,  when  news  of  the  War  arrives,  impossible  for  him 
and  compels  the  woman's  resolution  of  the  question  by  the  sac- 
rifice of  herself.  Who  can  say  how  much  the  inner  compulsion, 
arising  out  of  this  early  infantile,  strongly  affective  attitude 
toward  the  mother,  infused  the  ardent  desire  to  give  life  to  this 
woman  and  appropriate  her  to  his  unsatisfied  and  disappointed 
love,  and  how  far  it  compelled  the  growing  strength  and  delight 
of  this  love  until  the  sacrifice  became  unavoidable?  Of  such 
inner  causations  are  our  acts  merely  the  outward  and  often 
the  mystifying  expression.  Freedom  loses  itself  within  the 
compulsion  and  then  must  be  attained  in  the  end  by  the 
path  of  pain  and  loss.  If  this  course  can  be  traced  even  so 
obscurely,  until  by  such  studies  the  hidden  life  shall  become 
more  plain,  the  development  of  this  play,  through  its  exquisite 
unfolding,  will  not  have  been  in  vain. 

It  was  in  the  hands  of  Hamilton  to  follow  the  path  of  self 
gratification  and  to  have  taught  the  woman  that  way.  Instead, 
because  there  is  another  power  than  the  infantile  determinant, 
which  is  working  toward  a  truer  freedom,  and  because  he  has 
felt  this  truth  in  this  embodiment  of  the  ancient  heart  of  the 
willow  tree,  he  adopts  a  different  course.  The  child  that  merely 
sinks  back  upon  the  mother's  breast  there  to  have  every  wish 
fulfilled  will  only  seek  that  which  pleases  as  the  moment's  toy. 
The  mother  image  in  its  actual  truth  is  forgotten;  in  its  place 
is  substituted  the  so-called  freedom  of  having  returned  to  the 
place  where  wishes  come  true,  as  the  unreasoning  child  con- 
ceives wishes  and  seizes  after  their  fulfilment.  The  truth  which 
the  freed  spirit  within  us  seeks  and  finds  is  other  than  this  and 
toward  this  Hamilton  turns.  He  has  found  that  which  reality, 
accepted  with  the  straightforward  spirit  of  the  adult  attitude, 
will  reveal  to  all,  but  which  is  withheld  from  the  autoerotic 
self  seeker.  This  is  the  recurrent  message  of  the  play  which 
opens  up  the  path  of  freedom  and  health. 

The  lovers,  their  faces  thus  set  toward  the  freedom  of  reality, 
enter  upon  a  life  of  mutual  bliss,  but  of  mutual  service  likewise, 
to  be  finally  consummated  only  when  the  price  of  freedom  has 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

been  paid.  Knowledge  and  experience  dawn  at  first  through 
the  unselfish  consideration  and  self  restraint  of  the  lover,  often 
puzzled  and  awed  before  the  questioning  innocence  and  complete 
trust  of  the  virgin  woman  before  him.  The  double  com- 
pelling forces  are  however  at  work.  On  the  one  hand,  even 
in  his  chaste  restraint  toward  the  object  of  his  care,  he  is  build- 
ing up  more  strongly  upon  this  new  object  the  old  infantile  sense 
of  rest  and  peace  and  self  absorbed  enjoyment  of  its  love;  on 
the  other  hand,  within  her  is  the  racial  depth  of  the  mother 
soul,  tending  likewise  doubtless  toward  the  pleasure  goal,  but 
yet  with  an  ultimate  truth  and  strength  which  forbids  the  losing 
of  the  creative  goal,  and  wins  it  finally  by  its  supreme  act.  The 
heart  of  the  willow  tree,  though  ages  old,  has  the  immortal 
power  of  revivification  and  rebirth  for  itself  and  the  being  upon 
whom  it  bestows  its  love.  It  is  old  and  yet  fresh  and  young 
and  untried. 

This  pretty  world  of  delight,  of  which  she  will  take  all  as 
her  gift,  which  must  be  filled  only  with  bright  birds  and  pleas- 
ure and  harmlessness,  is  hers  by  right  merely  of  claim  upon 
her  hero's  love.  In  it  she  may  perhaps  employ  the  feminine 
devices  of  pouting,  jealousy,  the  aid  of  personal  adornment, 
whatever  will  keep  her  in  playful  touch  with  that  which  she 
counts  her  own.  She  will  defend  herself  by  shutting  her 
thoughts  to  the  time  when  she  must  be  old  and  ugly  and  un- 
attractive. The  images  and  symbols,  means  of  pleasure  and 
enjoyment,  are  at  hand  to  be  cherished  and  used.  She  cannot 
accept  the  fish  as  the  coarse  mercenary  dealer  offers  it  nor  value 
the  birds  and  crickets  according  to  their  market  price.  Pleas- 
ure for  her  must  be  a  free  and  happy  gift.  Buying  and  selling 
it  in  terms  of  gain  are  not  to  be  conceived.  Value  for  value 
is  a  part  of  the  lesson  to  be  learned  but  never  that  perversity 
of  sacred  gifts  which  makes  of  the  emblems  of  love  objects  of 
barter  and  gross  nutriment.  So  at  any  rate  may  be  interpreted 
the  touch  of  appreciation  she  puts  upon  these  things,  in  the  light 
of  the  unconscious  struggle  which  is  manifest  in  the  effort  to  dis- 
cover and  use  life  aright.  If  we  could  value  better  and  more 
truly  the  symbols  which  are  to  the  unconscious  in  fable,  legend 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  1 05 

and  individual  dream,  expressions  and  opportunities  of  the  love 
life  and  its  creative  power,  we  too  might  learn  the  unsatisfac- 
toriness  and  the  disease-producing  power,  the  loss  of  freedom 
in  the  abuse  of  these  possessions.  The  symbolization  which 
finds  itself  in  these  things  is  too  readily  denied  and  thus  a 
cultural  prudishness  fails  to  see  the  inner  value  for  which  these 
stand.  This  dainty  personification  of  the  ancient  heart  of  things 
instinctively  and  intuitively  proceeds  in  her  choice  and  valuation 
of  them  straight  to  their  true  inner  worth. 

The  fish  therefore  must  be  consigned  not  to  the  kitchen  but 
to  a  home  among  the  free  swimming  goldfish  in  the  pool  and 
birds  and  cricket  must  sing  and  rejoice  in  happy  freedom,  such 
as  that  in  which  she  herself  lives.  Yet  she  knows  none  the  less 
instinctively  the  value  of  the  masculine  serpent  god,  god  of  com- 
fort in  the  home,  to  whom  she  prays  for  the  rest  of  her  lord 
by  night  and  to  whom  she  finally  entrusts  him  for  his  care 
when  the  time  of  her  departure  comes.  It  is  the  love  that 
spreads  for  Hamilton  "  that  soft  feathered  cushion  of  his  "  for 
his  repose.  She  is  hurt  also  by  the  vehemence  of  his  love  and 
yet  shyly,  smilingly  proffers  her  acknowledgment  that  she  likes 
being  hurt  by  him.  He  also  must  reveal  at  her  question  love's 
realities,  with  the  awe  of  the  greatness  of  love  that  knows  self 
restraint  and  asks  reverently  whether  he  has  the  right  to  make 
the  path  to  her  across  the  snow,  to  her  the  butterfly  more  white 
than  the  snows  of  Fujiyama  against  which  it  might  fly. 

Of  such  stuff  not  dreams  alone  are  made  but  of  such  concrete 
elements,  touched  here  with  a  beauty  surpassing  in  delicacy  yet 
exquisitely  frank,  does  love  consist,  and  through  such  concrete 
elements,  hidden  and  revealed  -in  the  symbolism,  does  love  in 
its  creative  mission  find  expression.  They  are  the  forms  through 
which  is  made  known  the  "  wish "  which  is  "  the  most  real 
thing  in  the  heart  of  a  man."  Man  has  grown  suspicious  of 
the  wish  striving  thus  to  make  itself  known  and,  frightened, 
has  sought  to  crowd  these  things  out  of  sight,  deny  their  mean- 
ing and  value,  until  such  repression  has  succeeded  outwardly 
in  bringing  them  to  ill  favor  and  within  in  forming  the  fettering 
of  the  emotional  life  and  its  compulsive  direction  of  psychic 


XO6  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

energy  into  symptomatic  paths,  through  which  the  repressed 
factors  secure  a  blind  escape.  Thus  disguised  and  not  under- 
stood they  control  external  conscious  life  but  in  doing  so  cur- 
tail its  freedom  and  limit  the  higher  expenditure  of  energy  in 
perfect  health.  These  concrete  factors  are  too  real,  too  vital 
to  remain  quietly  in  the  heart  of  man.  The  artist  has  dared 
again  and  again  to  bring  them  forth,  touching  them  gently,  free- 
ing them  through  beauty,  and  so  granting  to  himself  and  to 
those  who  look  upon  and  receive  his  work  a  corresponding  free- 
dom from  the  disturbance  and  upheaval  which  follow  upon  such 
repression  and  misdirection  of  these  desires  and  strivings.  He 
in  this  way  opens  out  the  path  to  health  in  the  right  use  of  them. 

Not  the  least  of  the  mission  of  this  charming  fantasy,  there- 
fore, lies  in  the  placing  thus  beautifully  and  wholesomely  into 
our  hands  some  of  the  images  and  symbols  with  which  the 
eternal  wish  in  the  heart  of  man  must  busy  itself.  The  delicate 
handling  of  these  points  the  way  to  the  sublimation,  which 
comes  not  through  repression  but  through  the  artistic  and  thus 
transformed  use  of  these  things.  Their  higher  as  well  as  their 
lower  values  are  brought  to  attention,  each  in  its  place  and  each 
in  its  own  true  worth  and  beauty.  Like  the  beliefs  of  old  Japan 
to  faithful,  simple-hearted  Nogo,  the  stories  and  the  language 
of  the  unconscious  "  make  afraid,  make  shiver."  We  have  be- 
come so  frightened  over  them,  in  the  long-continued  effort  to 
get  away  from  their  little  understood  and  acknowledged  power 
and  value,  that  we  have  lost  sight  of  them  as  very  definite  path- 
ways which  our  own  human  race  has  laid  down  out  of  the 
things  of  "  beauty  and  eternity,"  and  as  the  way  which  leads 
back  again  to  attain  the  knowledge  which  is  mastery  and  serv- 
iceable control.  A  clearer  acceptance  of  them  is  sure  release 
from  the  compulsion  to  dark  and  hidden  courses  of  feeling  and 
action,  in  which  freedom  is  lost. 

The  profoundly  moving  message  of  the  play  lies  however  in 
the  larger  synthesis  which  embraces  and  outreaches  the  wish 
in  the  heart  of  man.  It  takes  these  lesser  elements,  the  incom- 
plete language  of  the  wish,  and  it  brings  them  to  conscious 
fulfilment.  Still  more  it  lifts  them  through  the  larger  purpose 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  IO7 

of  the  wish,  as  it  exalts  and  transforms  that  wish,  up  to  the 
higher  attainment  of  racial  service  which  society  requires. 
Pleasant  indeed  is  it  for  the  lovers,  islanded  in  their  romantic 
dream  world  founded  upon  the  heart  of  things,  to  play  and 
delight  in  these  verities  of  love.  Something  deeper  neverthe- 
less must  be  preparing,  through  which  they  shall  really  discover 
and  test  the  ultimate  depths  upon  which  love  bases  its  creative 
right  to  exist  and  the  heights  of  service  toward  which  its  cre- 
ative impulse  must  soar.  The  truth  and  strength  of  the  spirit 
of  love  and  sacrifice  must  respond  to  the  clarion  call  of  reality. 
The  eternal  heart  must  meet  the  demand  to  lose  all,  or  refuse 
and  seek  only  the  immediate  pleasure.  Before  the  crucial  test 
the  man  stands  in  bewilderment.  His  way  is  not  clear,  he  is 
not  free.  Externally  he  is  not  free,  for  he  has  a  responsibility 
toward  the  dainty  creature  whom  he  has  summoned  from  the 
unknown  for  his  own  pure  delight.  It  is  the  mother  image 
which  he  has  unconsciously  sought  and  which  now  holds  him, 
through  its  very  helplessness  and  dependence,  in  the  form  in 
which  he  has  known  it,  standing  as  the  "  terrible  mother,"  which 
Jung  discovers  in  mythology  and  in  individual  struggle,  the 
unconscious  image  from  which  it  is  impossible  to  break  away. 
Is  thus  the  path  of  freedom  for  service  and  achievement  barred, 
one's  conscious  purpose  and  wish  rendered  unattainable?  Per- 
haps to  Hamilton  the  return  to  the  very  heart  of  the  ancient 
willow  was  merely  the  return  to  the  unconscious  child  wish. 
Holding  now  the  mother  image,  which  his  desire  has  recalled 
from  the  ancient  soul  of  the  race,  it  instead  holds  him  and  all 
freedom  is  lost.  He  is  powerless  before  even  the  call  to  duty 
for  his  "  England  and  George  King."  Action,  to  which  the  cour- 
age of  his  English  friends  has  been  roused,  is  no  more  possible 
to  him  than  it  is  to  the  compulsive  neurotic  reduced  through 
the  opposing  forces  of  his  inner  conflict  to  a  helpless  inactivity. 
He  must  follow  a  path  of  self  established  loyalty  which  con- 
flicts with  the  larger  needs  of  the  world. 

One  thing  however  is  unknown  to  him.  He  is  far  from  an 
actual  understanding  of  the  inner  source  and  meaning  of  his 
conflict  and  his  ability  to  desert  this  woman  whom  he  has  made 


IO8  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

his,  to  whom  indeed  his  responsibility,  since  he  has  called  her 
into  being,  is  clear.  Scarcely  better  knowledge  has  he  of  the 
depth  and  reality  of  the  world-old  mother  soul.  Not  so  lightly 
perhaps  would  he  have  left  his  frail  treasure  that  last  evening 
to  the  power  of  her  own  thoughts  and  convictions,  had  he  been 
able  to  penetrate  beneath  the  blithesome,  playful  attitude  of 
joyous  living  which  had  been  his  to  know.  The  woman's  heart 
too,  the  eternal  mother  heart,  attains  to  but  one  way  of  freedom. 
Whether  it  is  freedom  for  itself  or  for  the  soul  committed 
by  love  to  its  charge,  it  is  found  by  the  way  of  sacrifice.  Who 
can  say,  in  the  present  mere  dawning  of  understanding  and 
interpretation  of  the  intricacy  of  unconscious  motivation,  which 
underlies  conscious  observed  activity,  and  of  the  conflicts  waged 
beneath  the  surface,  the  extent  of  the  unconscious  inhibitions 
and  contraints?  Here  too  the  same  compulsion  in  the  struggle 
between  the  pleasure  wish  on  the  one  hand  and  the  upward 
striving  of  the  eternal  wish  on  the  other  throw  about  the  mother 
soul  the  fetters  which  destroy  the  action  of  perfect  freedom.  The 
effort  to  overcome,  to  master  the  baser  desires,  those  which 
lead  back  to  rest  and  the  indolence  of  inactive  peace,  the  effort 
to  force  on  the  creative  urge  defeats  its  own  end  and  cuts  off 
life  itself.  It  is  not  however  futile.  The  defeat  comes  along 
the  upward  path  of  striving  and  is  therefore  only  apparent. 
The  sacrifice  is  not  in  vain.  It  is  one  of  those  compromise 
results  with  which  the  race  in  its  imperfection  and  insufficiency 
has  for  the  time  to  be  content.  It  is  the  price  too  often  of  its 
greater  gain,  but  the  price  is  willingly  paid  and  for  it  the  world 
obtains  progress,  stimulus  to  further  endeavor,  immortality. 
The  mother  heart  is  to  man  the  source  and  the  symbol  of  all 
pleasure  and  delight  and  comfort.  It  is  also  the  eternal  source 
of  the  power  which  urges  man,  whether  he  knows  it  or  not, 
onward  to  duty  and  activity,  as  Hamilton  was  driven  from  the 
peace  of  the  garden  home  to  face  reality  and  find  there  at  last 
not  only  his  duty  but  the  consummation  of  his  joy.  Such  was 
the  intimation  in  the  completeness  of  the  final  sacrifice  of  the 
mother  heart,  which  sent  him  to  duty,  to  wife  and  the  children 
which  she  had  never  had.  Like  the  princess  of  old,  this  new 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM 


IO9 


incarnation  of  the  heart  of  the  ancient  Willow  Tree  left  the 
man  to  seek  all  these  in  the  sphere  to  which  he  and  his  work 
belonged.  True  to  the  deepest  psychological  meaning  of  the 
eternal  mother  heart,  the  heart  which  was  in  the  willow  tree, 
not  only  the  bliss  of  pleasure  was  there  for  the  child  man,  but 
it  is  the  source  to  him  of  rebirth,  from  which  he  goes  into  the 
world  of  activity  there  to  find  useful  work  and  the  sublimation 
of  the  mother  love,  which  alone  belongs  to  adult  reality. 

The  world  shouts  to  the  hero  who  goes  forth  on  such  a 
path.  It  boasts  for  him  of  glory,  honor,  duty,  This  spirit 
which  is  in  the  mother  soul,  on  the  contrary,  its  victory  which 
is  the  steady  advance  of  the  race,  move  in  silence  and  alone. 
The  travail  of  a  rebirth,  in  whatever  man  or  woman  it  takes 
place,  is  a  victory  in  the  loneliness  of  an  inner  struggle,  its 
own  Gethsemane.  Happy  if  there  is  at  hand  the  faithfulness 
of  some  humble  Nogo,  as  there  was  for  the  Princess,  who, 
though  sobbing  with  the  abandon  of  a  simple  soul,  would  yet 
lay  the  axe  to  the  root  of  the  tree.  The  shadow  of  the  sac- 
rifice transfigures  even  him  as  he  too  enters  into  its  power. 
The  threat  of  death  cannot  prevail  upon  him  to  bring  the  sac- 
rifice to  pass.  But  when  he  recognizes  the  claim  of  something 
deeper,  that  something  more  even  than  the  eternal  well-being 
and  life  of  the  Princess  is  at  stake,  something  that  answers 
within  him  to  a  greater  call,  he  complies.  All  protest  is  stilled, 
and  unflinchingly,  uncompromisingly  the  task  is  performed.  The 
tree  on  whose  standing  the  life  of  the  princess  depends  is  hewn 
down. 

There  is  a  peculiar  fitness  in  the  portrayal  of  this  dran.a 
of  life  in  this  kingdom  of  Old  Japan.  It  is  a  land  externally 
of  peace  and  delight.  There  is  an  outward  perfection  of  clean- 
liness and  trimness  and  scrupulous  care,  which  adds  to  the  charm 
of  its  beauty.  A  softness  and  delicacy  and  prettiness  of  nature 
are  its  own  characteristics.  Its  artists  reproduce  it  and  even 
the  common  people  are  touched  with  its  grace  and  flit  about 
their  daily  pursuits  with  an  almost  butterfly  fancifulness  and 
freedom  of  light  and  carefree  movement.  Dress  and  manner 
and  smiling  face,  even  the  ceaseless  slip  of  their  sandaled  feet 


IIO  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

or  the  click  of  their  wooden  clogs,  all  are  expressive  of  the 
simple  playful  character  which  lies  upon  the  surface.  Yet  a 
greater  power  makes  itself  manifest  in  their  national  history 
and  closer  knowledge  of  their  daily  lives  reveals  also  the  care 
and  weariness,  poverty,  discontent,  strife  beneath  this  pleasant 
exterior.  Thus  also  in  their  pretty  land  do  the  frequent  earth- 
quakes and  actively  eruptive  volcanoes,  which  have  produced  the 
scarred  and  jagged  mountain  peaks,  speak  of  a  greater  energy 
beneath  the  surface,  which  struggles  to  break  forth  and  having 
no  guidance  or  control  works  destruction  and  ruin. 

Such  forces,  however,  in  the  human  psyche  are  capable  of 
understanding  and  control,  if  man  becomes  willing  to  look 
within.  To  such  an  insight  this  "  Fantasy  of  Old  Japan  "  is 
directed.  It  grants  more  than  a  hint  of  the  forces  of  desire 
which  arise  there,  meet  and  entangle  one  another  and  hinder 
the  useful  constructive  discharge  of  these  forces.  It  points 
the  way  to  salvation  through  sacrifice,  by  which  freedom  from 
this  inner  restraint  and  compulsion  is  attained.  It  offers  far 
more  than  this,  however,  to  the  thoughtful  investigator  who  is 
seeking  a  fuller  freedom  for  man,  which  will  assure  to  him 
a  more  perfect  health,  in  which  attainment  can  be  won  by  a 
more  comprehensive  understanding  of  these  hidden  things  and 
a  greater  freedom  of  constructive  use  and  creative  activity  may 
result.  This  is  a  .goal  to  be  won  in  our  present  ignorance  and 
insufficiency  by  this  path  of  sacrifice,  but  it  opens  a  way  of 
fuller  knowledge  of  the  inner  nature,  which  will  find  rather  a 
more  liberal  exercise  of  all  its  faculties  toward  a  higher,  more 
thoroughly  racial  service  in  a  more  complete  sublimation.  It 
gives  promise  that  this  may  in  time  supplant  the  present  cur- 
tailment and  loss  of  certain  powers  that  others  entangled  with 
them  in  the  little  understood  desires  shall  become  free.  Sac- 
rifice has  always  been  recognized  as  the  "  law  of  service  to  the 
whole  " ;  sacrifice  must  itself  however  be  free  to  become  more 
thoroughly  constructive  in  a  synthesis  and  upward  direction  of 
these  powers,  not  in  the  destructive  cutting  off  of  opportunity 
and  energy  which  our  present  ignorance  of  the  hidden  con- 
flicting psychic  forces  necessitates. 


COMPULSION  AND  FREEDOM  III 

"  So  long  as  we  are  blindly  and  ignorantly,  rolled  about  by 
the  forces  of  nature,"  Matthew  Arnold  has  said,  "  their  con- 
tradiction baffles  us  and  lames  us;  so  soon  as  we  have  clearly 
discerned  what  they  are,  and  begun  to  apply  to  them  a  law  of 
measure,  control,  and  guidance,  they  may  be  made  to  work  for 
our  good  and  to  carry  us  forward."  In  knowledge  of  these 
forces  lies  individual  and  social  health,  that  ideal  of  social  health 
in  which  men  and  women  are  no  longer  struggling  at  cross  pur- 
poses, but  united  in  mutual  and  ever  widening  achievement.  The 
drama,  by  each  appeal  to  look  into  the  inner  center  of  these 
forces,  advances  by  so  much  our  knowledge  and  understanding. 
For  by  its  beauty  it  attracts  to  the  heart  of  things,  by  its  truth 
it  convinces  of  the  reality  found  there. 


CHAPTER    VIII 
THE  NATURAL  PATH  OF  SUBLIMATION  a 

"  Our  play  deals  with  mother's  love,  the  love  of  youth,  and 
the  hate  of  men,  which  makes  them  do  unhappy  things."  Thus 
simply  the  Chorus  introduces  the  message  of  "  The  Yellow 
Jacket."  At  first  sight  this  introduction  and  the  working  out 
of  the  drama  would  seem  to  present  simply  a  pleasing  and 
attractive  story  of  such  mother's  love  passing  over  into  ro- 
mantic love  and  tinged  just  enough  with  the  darker  things  of 
hate,  to  blend  them  all  in  a  happy  ending.  It  is  a  happy  play, 
in  spite  of  the  tragedies  which  lie  in  its  unfolding,  because  of 
its  victorious  and  joyous  ending  for  the  hero  and  because  of 
the  charm  given  it  in  the  fancifulness  of  its  Oriental  setting. 
There  is  besides  a  remoteness  granted  through  the  latter  and 
the  admixture  in  it  of  indifferent  realism  offset  by  the  vivid 
imaginative  coloring  by  which  the  ordinary  external  aids  for 
producing  the  necessary  theatrical  illusions  are  dispensed  with 
while  yet  the  illusion  is  so  richly  supplied. 

Aside  from  these  more  obvious  charms  nevertheless  and  the 
simple  movement  and  outcome  of  the  story,  there  is  a  psycho- 
logical unfolding  which  moves  deeper  and  is  as  old  as  the 
tale  of  human  love  itself.  All  literatures  have  busied  themselves 
with  the  telling  of  it,  sometimes  in  its  successful  development, 
as  the  hero  has  won  his  way  out  to  victory  over  the  inevitable 
obstacles,  but  oftener  in  the  tragedies  that  have  represented 
the  seriousness  of  these  obstacles  innate  in  human  life  and  its 
love  and  causing  too  often  a  fatal  outcome. 

1  Printed  in  the  Medical  Record,  Apr.  21,  1917,  under  title:  The  Yellow 
Jacket  and  the  Flowery  Kingdom:  A  Recent  Dramatic  Conception  of 
the  "CEdipus  Complex."  George  C.  Hazelton,  George  Cochrane,  Jr.,  J. 
H.  Benrimo:  The  Yellow  Jacket.  Boston,  1921.  In  T.  H.  Dickinson, 
Chief  Contemporary  Dramatists. 

112 


THE    NATURAL   PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  113 

It  is  not  the  story  of  love  alone  as  that  forms  more  narrowly 
the  theme  of  drama  and  romance,  but  the  great  drama  of  human 
life  which  is  contained  in  the  words  in  the  summary,  "  mother's 
love,  the  love  of  youth,  and  the  hate  of  men  which  makes 
them  do  unhappy  things."  At  least  we  have  here  that  side  of 
the  great  drama  of  life  which  represents  the  hero's  career  in 
the  task  of  winning  his  way  and  becoming  master  of  himself 
and  his  destiny.  And  if  this  is  presented  chiefly  in  this  as  in 
other  dramas,  from  the  masculine  aspect  of  the  story,  it  is  no 
less  true  in  principle  and  practical  working  for  the  woman  in 
her  effort  at  adjustment  in  the  unfolding  of  her  life.  In  the 
latter  case  it  would  only  be  expressed  in  somewhat  different 
terms. 

Freud  has  designated  the  ever  recurring  theme  and  its  pres- 
ence in  every  life  by  the  term  "  CEdipus  complex "  from  the 
Sophoclean  drama,  one  of  its  most  renowned  expressions  in 
literature.  Most  briefly  stated  it  represents  the  relation  of  the 
child  individually  to  the  father  and  the  mother  and  the  profound 
tragedy  which  may  result  throughout  life  from  a  maladjustment 
of  that  threefold  relationship.  There  the  situation  ends  in  dark- 
est tragedy,  here  out  of  the  same  posssibility  of  relationships 
they  are  brought  instead  to  a  happy  issue  and  the  hero  emerges 
at  the  last  free  both  of  the  love  that  might  bind  him  or  of  the 
hate  that  would  destroy  him,  a  victor  in  his  own  right,  wearer 
at  last  of  the  "  sunhued  garment "  for  "  his  steps  are  toward 
the  sun,  whither  he  goes." 

The  classic  features  of  the  CEdipus  story  or  "  family  ro- 
mance," out  of  which  it  grows,  are  all  present  in  the  "  Yellow 
Jacket,"  sometimes  ludicrously,  sometimes  touchingly  exagger- 
ated but  making  of  the  developing  story  a  true  epitome  of  life. 
The  tiny  baby  boy  is  recognized  at  once  as  the  unwelcome 
rival  to  the  father,  just  as  in  the  old  classical  tragedy  the  babe 
was  prophesied  by  the  oracle  to  be  the  destroyer  and  usurper 
of  the  father.  The  father,  governor  of  the  province,  repre- 
senting the  Emperor,  the  Son  of  Heaven,  and  therefore  ex- 
alting himself  and  his  conception  of  power,  can  brook  no  rival 
to  his  desires  and  to  the  deified  exaltation  of  himself.  He 


JJ4  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

fears  his  own  loss  of  power  and  prestige,  sensing  the  inroads 
the  small  feeble  babe  can  make  in  his  capacity  for  growth  and 
conquest  which  lie  before  him  but  which  are  receding  behind 
the  aging  father.  On  this  account  he  craves  the  stimulus  of 
the  younger  woman,  the  second  wife,  whom  he  would  exalt 
to  the  place  occupied  by  the  babe's  mother.  Mother  and  son 
must  both  be  removed.  Rivalry  and  jealousy,  in  the  vain  effort 
to  maintain  and  exercise  the  waning  forces  which  are  repre- 
sented in  the  older  passing  generation,  are  the  manifestations 
of  an  active  hate  which  aims  to  obtain  the  ends  which  serve 
only  the  self,  and  which  are  therefore  in  the  end  self  defeated. 
Just  as  will  be  seen  the  offspring  of  the  rival  marriage,  that 
which  selfishly  and  through  crime  attempts  the  re-establish- 
ment of  the  father's  waning  power  and  the  overthrow  of  the 
son  who  should  rightfully  have  carried  forward  that  power  in 
his  own  time,  the  rival  offspring  is  only  a  weakling  of  the  most 
selfish  and  unproductive  type.  He  is  so  filled  with  that  eternal 
indolence  which  is  the  besetting  inner  psychic  sin  of  the  race, 
the  offset  to  the  spirit  of  progress  and  endeavor,  that  he  yields 
at  last  eagerly  to  his  stronger  brother  rather  than  exert  or 
expose  himself  to  retaining  even  the  false  semblance  of  power 
which  he  has  been  enjoying. 

The  drama  shifts  and  alternates  its  psychic  scenes  as  it  al- 
ternates the  actual  pictures  upon  the  stage.  The  unconscious 
wish  which  represents  desire  on  the  part  of  the  son  is  also  in 
evidence,  working  no  less  as  a  representation  of  the  unconscious 
wish  element  active  beneath  the  external  course  of  events  than 
the  father's  striving  for  power.  Racially  the  son's  wish  lies 
upon  the  side  of  right,  and  probably  for  this  reason  enlists 
most  fundamentally  the  sympathy  and  championship  of  the 
audience  and  not  alone  because  his  wish  constitutes  the  more 
obvious  theme  and  the  external  structure  of  the  play.  The 
son's  wish,  in  the  opportunity  before  the  young  life  of  promise, 
is  directed  toward  the  reality  of  achievement,  the  father's  is  di- 
rected selfishly  to  the  personal  prolonging  and  enjoyment  of 
a  power  which  has  had  its  day  of  exercise  and  already  repro- 
duced itself  for  posterity. 


THE    NATURAL   PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  115 

Nevertheless  it  is  upon  both  sides  the  ever  repeated  racial 
conflict  between  the  old  and  the  new — between  father  and  son. 
As  the  father  in  the  character  assigned  to  him  in  the  play  claims 
the  title  of  high  ruler,  so  in  a  deeper,  more  subtle  way  is  the 
same  high  aspiration,  which  belongs  always  to  the  inner  wish 
of  man,  represented  in  the  situation  developed  through  the  child 
and  through  his  struggles  back  to  his  rightful  parentage  as 
the  play  proceeds.  The  drama  sets  him  consciously  as  the  son 
of  one  of  high  standing,  the  governor  of  the  province.  There- 
fore logically  he  must  win  his  way  back  through  the  intrigues 
that  have  deprived  him  of  his  lawful  place,  to  the  kingdom 
and  the  throne  which  are  his.  But  the  telling  of  such  a  tale 
contains  a  deeper  reference  to  the  wish  in  the  unconscious  heart 
of  man  and  to  its  complex  working  there.  The  construction 
and  development  of  the  tale  is  an  artistic  realization,  phantastic 
though  it  may  be,  of  a  universal,  deeply  buried  but  active  desire 
and  effort  after  power  and  sense  of  security  and  worth.  Again 
it  is  the  mission  of  the  drama  to  unite  phantasy  and  artistic 
expression  and  give  to  such  a  wish  at  least  this  substance. 
Through  the  victory  of  the  hero,  through  his  winning  in  the 
strength  of  reality  rather  than  mere  dreams,  it  directs  also  to 
a  saving  reality  all  who  secretly  cherish  such  a  wish  and  dan- 
gerously rely  upon  phantasy  gratification  rather  than  the  ac- 
tual purposeful  accomplishment  in  some  more  real  and  work- 
able form. 

The  "  Yellow  Jacket  "  follows  the  universal  form  of  such  a 
wish.  The  humble  child  claims  a  ruler  for  his  father.  The 
child  mind  is  not  satisfied  with  less  in  accord  with  the  seeking 
for  ego  glorification.  The  phantasy  says,  as  the  plot  of  the 
drama  puts  it  into  the  mouth  of  the  hero:  "  These  kindly  but 
humble  parents  are  not  mine.  I  must  forth  to  seek  my  own." 
As  so  often  with  the  conscious  handling  of  the  unconscious 
wishes,  the  wish  is  projected  around  so  that  beginning  and  end 
appear  reversed.  Thus  for  conscious  recognition  the  child  is  rep- 
resented as  nobly  born  but  cast  out.  He  and  his  mother  are  to 
be  murdered  but  this  would  interefere  with  the  unfolding  of 
the  psychic  wish,  except  in  so  far  as  it  would  establish  still 


jj£  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

more  surely  the  son's  desired  right  to  regard  the  father  as 
unjust  and  the  object  of  hate.  To  further  more  positive  ends 
of  the  wish  however  the  father's  plans  are  foiled.  It  is  enough 
for  the  psychic  purpose  that  the  murder  is  in  his  heart.  The 
babe  is  snatched  away  and  the  mother  left  to  die  without  the 
direct  intervention  of  the  father's  selfish  and  indifferent  cruelty. 
The  mother  must  be  rejected  nevertheless  so  that  the  child  may 
claim  her  as  all  his  own.  She  can  return  no  love  to  the  un- 
natural monster  nor  can  his  love  intrude  itself  any  more  upon 
her,  but  the  mother  and  son  are  bound  by  the  closest  ties  now 
of  common  rejection  and  suffering. 

This  play  proceeds  at  once,  however,  to  take  the  development 
of  the  child  not  along  the  dangerous  paths  of  fixation  upon 
such  an  original  impulse  but  makes  it  the  starting  point  of  a 
sublimation  into  health  and  freedom.  No  compulsion  arises 
from  the  childish  attitude  which  might  extend  the  baneful  in- 
fluence of  the  early  desires  throughout  the  hero's  life  but  these 
serve  only  as  the  inspiration  toward  conquest  in  the  hero's  own 
strength  and  right  of  manhood.  In  this  sense  the  play  forms 
an  ideal  treatment  of  the  subject,  an  ideal  which  is  by  no  means 
a  false  one,  but  the  realization  of  the  true  possibilities  of  life, 
as  set  over  against  the  too  frequent  neurosis  which  represents 
failure  to  attain  the  ideal.  It  is  a  pretty  oasis  of  success  among 
some  of  the  dramas  which  bring  the  truths  of  the  inner  life  to 
our  knowledge  rather  through  the  tragic  story  of  failure  in 
the  struggle.  Both  are  equally  instructive  and  at  the  same  time 
this  happier  presentation  is  saved  from  a  false  idealism  for  it 
is  not  unmixed  with  the  elements  of  failure,  the  infantile  self 
seeking  and  egocentricity  to  be  overcome  in  the  hero  himself 
as  well  as  the  effects  of  the  "  hate  of  men,  which  makes  them 
do  unhappy  things." 

The  intuitive  artistic  sense  which  wrought  the  play  has 
realized  the  mother  attachment  as  a  source  of  great  danger  to 
the  child  unless  through  spiritualization,  call  it  sublimation,  it 
becomes  inspiration  toward  the  full  attainment  of  life  and  its 
consummation  in  normal  adult  love.  The  plot  of  the  father  is 
foiled  by  the  wife  of  the  farmer  who  is  detailed  to  commit 


THE    NATURAL    PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  117 

the  murder  of  the  mother,  which  would  cause  the  death  of 
her  child.  At  the  suggestion  of  his  wife,  the  devoted  maid  of 
Chee  Moo,  this  first  wife,  the  farmer  substitutes  for  the  victim 
of  his  murderous  sword  the  evil  maid  of  the  second  wife,  who 
has  breathed  out  various  dark  suggestions  which  have  fed  the 
hate :  "  I  am  one  of  the  darkest  shadows  of  our  play."  Chee 
Moo  thus  goes  free  with  her  child  but  not  free  to  live  with 
her  child.  She  owes  a  deeper  and  truer  debt  of  life,  not  to 
her  husband's  selfish  fearsome  cruelty,  but  (to  the  spirit  of 
growth  and  freedom  which  must  unfold  in  her  little  son.  That 
same  spirit  belongs  not  to  one  mother  with  her  son  but  to  the 
whole  race.  It  demands  of  her  the  supreme  sacrifice  even  as 
it  did  of.  the  woman  Heart  of  the  Ancient  Willow  Tree.  It 
appears  to  her  in  its  timeless  form,  in  the  spirit  of  the  babe's 
great  grandfather.  "  And  this,"  says  the  awakened  mother,  in- 
quiringly, "  is  the  little  Wu  Hoo  Git,  who  inherits  your  to-day 
and  your  to-morrow," — and  the  ancestral  spirit  answers :  "  As 
I  inherit  his  yesterday  and  his  yesterdays  before  it." 

The  mother  love  appears  as  a  conscious  love,  seeing  the 
future  through  the  eyes  of  the  present,  but  blinded  by  the  sor- 
row of  her  own  defeated  hopes  and  joys  to  the  profounder 
meaning  of  his  life  which  must  extend  timelessly  into  the  past. 
It  cannot  unaided  recognize  the  deeper  psychical  life,  where  the 
child  must  build  his  own  structure  untrammeled  by  the  love 
and  care  of  another,  who  would  chain  him  where  he  himself 
did  not  belong.  Yet  her  blindness  is  not  the  fixed  selfish  one 
of  her  licentious  husband.  It  is  only  the  momentary  conflict 
of  the  present  yielding  courageously  its  hold  upon  that  which 
it  would  so  gladly  retain.  The  sacrifice '  attains  its  value  and 
its  impetus  toward  the  racial  purpose  because  the  self  thus  first 
tests  its  worth  and  writes,  as  did  this  mother,  the  terms  of  the 
hero's  birthright  in  her  own  life  blood. 

She  listens,  not  without  the  hesitation  born  of  mother's  love 
and  caution,  to  the  ancestral  spirit's  message :  "  His  steps  are 
toward  the  sun,  whither  he  goes.  .  .  .  The  ravens  will  feed  him ; 
the  eagles  will  show  him  the  mountain  peaks.  .  .  .  And  a  maiden 
will  arise  to  teach  him  the  story  of  love.  ...  He  will  go  up 


ng  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

and  up,  till  he  wears  the  sun-hued  garment."  And  then  out 
of  her  natural  sorrow  and  fear,  in  the  racial  triumph  of  the 
mother's  heart,  this  "  mother  who  would  give  all  and  does  give 
all  "  writes  on  his  baby  garment  with  her  own  blood :  "  This 
is  Wu  Hoo  Git,  pure  and  perfect,  now,  decreed  to  live  ten 
thousand  years."  She  departs  then  to  heaven,  realistically  as 
the  Chinese  stage  devises,  and  the  babe  falls  to  the  kindly 
ministrations  of  the  faithful  farmer  and  his  wife.  Thus  the 
unconscious  wish  drama  is  also  carried  on.  The  child  phantasy 
has  thus  provided  for  the  substitution  in  time  of  the  august 
parentage  for  the  humble  father  and  mother  with  whom  its 
early  years  are  spent  and  its  actual  childhood  memories  formed. 

The  time  comes  in  the  drama  when  the  young  manhood  of 
the  hero  feels  the  call  of  its  own  power  and  nobility.  The  fet- 
ters of  humble  conditions  and  inexperience  strain  to  be  broken 
and  the  mother  soul  in  the  farmer's  wife,  no  less  sincere  than 
that  of  Chee  Moo,  is  ready  also  but  with  the  same  loving  re- 
luctance to  bid  him  godspeed.  "  He  promises  to  return.  He 
thinks  he  will  return  to  the  mother  breast.  ...  If  he  leaves 
our  sheltering  care,  he  will  never  return  to  the  mother  breast 
except  in  memory.  I  worship  my  soul  alone." 

The  double  element  in  the  attitude  of  a  child  toward  his 
parent,  whereby  the  parent  image  is  split  into  two  aspects  cor- 
responding to  the  child's  inner  selfish  fixation  or  his  outward 
development  and  adjustment  toward  reality,  finds  illustration  in 
the  two  fathers  of  the  hero.  The  self  centered  jealousy  of  the 
august  father  is  offset  by  the  better  relationship  with  the  sturdy 
and  honest  farmer.  The  latter  rejoices  in  the  "  glory  of  our 
beautiful  foster-child  "  and  his  right  to  the  boy  lies  in  the  act 
by  which  he  rid  the  child,  himself — shall  we  say  psychologi- 
cally— of  the  embodiment  of  the  evil  rivalry  of  the  father  re- 
lation. This  stronger  father  too  lives  in  that  spirit  of  the 
future  which  can  quickly  release  his  own  right  over  the  growing 
youth  and  welcome  "  the  man's  life  journey  to  match  his  ex- 
alted station"  which  "must  call  him.  .  .  .  Look!  He  comes 
like  the  sun  over  the  eastern  hill.  He  brings  a  new  day  to  us." 
Wu  Hoo  Git:  "I  long  for  the  free  air  of  life."  Lee  Sin 


THE    NATURAL   PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  119 

[the  farmer]  :  "  You  will  not  find  contentment  there."  Wu 
Hoo  Git :  "  Then  where  shall  I  find  contentment  ?  "  Lee  Sin : 
"  In  hard  work  and  pure  love."  Wu  Hoo  Git :  "  And  where 
will  I  find  pure  love  ? "  Suey  Sin  Fah  [the  farmer's  wife]  : 
"  In  a  mother's  arms."  Lee  Sin :  "  In  a  wife's  embrace."  And 
the  hero  fares  forth  to  learn  for  himself  whether  this  is  true 
or  no. 

The  unconscious  question  and  conflict  which  underlies  this 
whole  family  romance  on  the  part  of  the  boy  contains  other 
elements  of  hatred  and  rivalry  which  make  for  unhappy  things. 
These  are  projected  by  the  art  of  the  unconscious  psychology 
upon  various  other  persons  of  the  play  and  the  situations  which 
are  created  to  cast  difficulties  in  the  hero's  way  and  distract  him 
from  his  deeper  purpose  of  discovery  and  upbuilding.  These 
all  would  drag  him  through  jealousy,  hatred,  self  gratification, 
all  the  wiles  of  the  inner  self  seeking  wish  life,  away  from  this 
greater  and  truer  purpose,  which  is  the  racial  one.  The  chief 
embodiment  of  these  shadows  is  that  of  the  younger  brother, 
the  most  natural  rival  figure  to  be  opposed  to  the  hero  and  his 
success.  His  final  overcoming  will  also  again  represent  the  fulfil- 
ment of  the  unconscious  wish  for  supremacy  and  exaltation  of 
power.  Since  this  is  to  lie  with  the  hero  in  the  finding  of  true 
love  apart  from  the  infantile  source  of  it,  in  the  wife  rather 
than  the  mother,  the  supremacy  is  a  righteous  one  and  belongs 
to  social  and  racial  ends. 

The  rival  brother  is  the  opposite  of  this  and  epitome  of  all 
that  is  weak  and  pleasure  loving.  "  I  advise  this  honorable 
audience  that  I  am  a  man,  though  I  possess  a  daffodil  nature. 
I  go  to  view  delightful  embroideries,  but  retard  my  footsteps, 
that  you  may  observe  my  charm.  I  was  born  great.  Wu  Sin 
Yin  was  my  father,  and  Due  Jung  Fah,  the  second  wife,  my 
mother.  A  wonderful  alliance,  as  I  am  the  superb  result." 
Scarcely  any  comment  upon  these  his  own  words  is  needed  to 
introduce  the  character  of  this  younger  brother  and  its  sig- 
nificance in  the  drama.  He  is  indeed  the  superb  result  of  the 
father's  weakness,  stimulable  and  creative  only  along  the  path- 
way of  weak  and  unscrupulous  self  indulgence,  and  he  repre- 


I2Q  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

sents  the  partially  equipped,  inadequately  apportioned  character 
utterly  unfit  to  reign  in  his  own  right  or  in  that  of  service 
to  his  people,  as  he  is  utterly  incapable  of  love  except  the 
utmost  extravagance  of  self  love  and  effeminate  adornment 
and  indulgence.  He  is  the  epitome  of  narcissism,  that  love  of 
self,  that  all  must  conquer  if  they  would  succeed.  His  rival, 
the  hero,  "  must  not  dwell.  He  is  simply  vulgarly  manly,  while 
I  possess  feminine  qualities  of  great  luxuriance."  He  cannot 
tolerate  the  genuine  type  of  power  with  which  he  is  threatened 
in  the  noble  youth.  Therefore  he  "  must  contrive  to  destroy  his 
honesty  and  cleanness  of  life." 

The  trials  of  strength  and  endurance,  as  well  as  of  ingenuity 
and  of  faith  in  his  power  to  win,  to  which  the  hero  is  hence- 
forth subjected,  are  attributable  therefore  to  this  embodiment 
of  all  the  rivalry  of  ease  and  self  seeking  as  opposed  to  the 
effort  and  hardship  which  lie  upon  the  steep  and  narrow  road 
of  progress.  The  first  device  is  to  lure  the  young  man,  through 
the  agency  of  the  monkey  formed  man,  to  the  type  and  grade 
of  love  that  is  bought  and  sold.  It  is  new  to  the  innocent  youth, 
who  in  his  guilelessness  responds  with  all  the  naturalness  of 
the  awakening  man  to  the  tempting  sweets  spread  before  him. 
His  eyes  are  soon  opened  to  the  sordid  unreality  of  it  all  and 
the  unsatisfactoriness  of  a  love  which  has  no  character  of  per- 
manency nor  any  measure  of  its  inner  reality.  "  Gold  is  the 
measure  of  your  affection.  Your  hearts  are  outbalanced  in  the 
scales  by  a  few  grains  of  yellow  dust  .  .  ."  and  he  departs 
to  more  arduous  but  satisfying  pursuits. 

It  is  not  long  before  he  has  been  seen  by  Plum  Blossom.  She 
is  the  new  incarnation  of  that  mother  spirit  which  can  never 
desert  the  inner  heart  of  the  man,  only  abides  the  day  when  it 
may  reappear  in  a  form  which  is  new  and  complete  in  itself, 
free  of  all  childish  fetters  and  yet  somehow  infused  with  the 
never  dying  essence  of  old  memories  and  former  love.  The 
first  actual  meeting  with  Plum  Blossom  occurs  fittingly  when 
this  inner  essence  of  memory  has  stirred  a  definite  longing  for 
a  recognition  of  the  past,  something  that  will  assure  the  youth 
that  his  life  is  complete,  not  his  alone  in  the  present  and  the 


THE    NATURAL   PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  121 

future  but  grounded  in  the  past  as  well.  He  cries  out  for  his 
ancestors  whom  he  thinks  to  find  "  in  the  city  of  the  dead.  ...  I 
will  pray  at  the  tombs  for  the  gods  to  give  me  an  honorable 
mother.  ...  I  will  pray  at  the  tombs  for  the  gods  to  give  me 
an  honorable  mother,  with  a  delicate  name  —  one  that  drops 
like  a  sweet  song  from  the  lips,"  and  quite  unwitting  of  the 
significant  outcome  of  his  choice  he  chooses  through  the  name 
on  the  tomb  the  maiden  who  had  already  chosen  him  and  in 
whom  he  is  able  to  make  the  healthy  sublimation  of  the  mother 
desire  which  he  is  unconsciously  demanding.  As  he  bends  be- 
fore the  tomb  of  Plum  Blossom's  mother,  the  younger  Plum 
Blossom  peeps  from  the  shadow  of  the  celestial  weeping  wil- 
low tree  behind  him.  One  is  reminded  of  the  opposite  fate  of 
Narcissus,  who  enamored  of  his  own  likeness  stood  at  the  pool 
unmindful  of  the  nymph  near  by  pining  for  him  and  so  lost 
his  opportunity  and  hers  for  their  mutual  salvation.  It  is  not 
so  with  Wu  Hoo  Git.  He  healthily  forgets  the  tendency  of 
a  pleasure  which  answers  only  to  its  own  desire.  They  are 
united  —  they  may,  according  to  Chinese  usage,  be  united  in 
common  speech  only  because  they  have  a  common  mother,  the 
one  he  has  just  artificially  chosen.  It  is  true  psychically,  the 
lovers  must  meet  in  the  depth  of  the  ancient  childhood  desire 
but  not  to  remain  there.  They  become  so  entranced  in  mutual 
admiration  of  one  another's  qualities  that  Plum  Blossom  is 
suddenly  recalled  to  herself,  "  We  are  forgetting  our  mother," 
but  there  is  more  than  the  conscious  reference  in  the  spoken 
resolve  of  Wu  Hoo  Git:  "...  I  renounce  our  mother  and 
will  contend  with  him  who  seeks  your  hand." 

It  is  more  necessary  now  than  ever  that  the  hero  shall  es- 
tablish his  connection  with  the  past  more  definitely  so  that  he 
may  satisfy  the  proud  and  cautious  father  of  Plum  Blossom, 
so  he  sets  out  more  determinedly  than  ever  to  win  his  way  to 
his  own  estate.  Although  this  is  the  kingdom  of  his  birth  and 
his  father's  throne,  it  is  not  a  backward  way  that  he  is  to  travel. 
The  healthy  youthful  arrogance  of  Wu  Hoo  Git  has  made  this 
so  completely  his  own  rightful  goal,  and  his  attitude  is  so  much 
more  one  of  real  governorship  than  that  of  the  selfish  voluptuous 


I22  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

governor  of  the  past,  that  the  path  toward  the  goal  is  a  forward 
one.  The  weak  scheming  brother  represents  that  backward 
tendency,  the  hero  presses  steadily  ahead  in  all  his  purpose 
and  attainment.  In  winning  the  royal  jacket  or  in  possessing 
at  last  the  maid,  he  is  looking  toward  the  future  and  building 
in  all  his  attitude  for  it  alone.  Hence  his  success. 

Even  Plum  Blossom  however  must  be  withdrawn  from  him 
while  he  learns  through  the  encountering  of  new  difficulties 
both  the  measure  of  his  own  strength  and  also  its  dependence 
upon  the  love  and  devotion  of  a  woman,  the  mother  and  her 
successor.  His  masculine  conceit  prevents  this  dependence  from 
becoming  a  too  appreciative  one.  When  the  slipper  which  Plum 
Blossom  gave  him  to  wave  toward  her  saves  him  in  his  extremity 
he  believes  all  too  readily  that  after  all  it  was  his  own  prowess 
that  has  saved  him.  Thus  does  man  usually  receive  the  de- 
votion of  love,  utilizing  it  and  going  boastfully  on  his  way. 
He  is  bound  in  the  toils  of  the  Spider,  who  has  enticed  him  into 
the  meshes  of  his  web,  where  he  then  hopelessly  entangles  him. 
The  shaking  of  the  slipper  has  an  instant  effect  upon  the  "  demon 
Spider."  "  My  web  spins  not.  My  joints  crinkle  in  the  light 
of  purity."  But  as  Wu  Hoo  Git  finds  himself  released  from  the 
entangling  strands  and  feels  in  his  "  expanding  soul  the  power 
to  o'ercome  all  monsters  wild,"  he  adds,  "  I  would  that  Plum 
Blossom  might  see  my  unaided  triumph.  She  would  adore  my 
fiery  bravery." 

Still  sorer  trials  lie  yet  between  the  hero  and  the  two  goals 
of  his  desire.  The  unhappy  schemes  of  envy  and  hate  are  not 
yet  exhausted.  There  comes  a  time  when  the  destroying  power 
has  reached  its  ultimate  influence,  a  purely  blighting  one,  in 
the  congealing  coldness  which  overtakes  him  and  freezes  even 
the  slipper  in  his  bosom.  "  I  would  shake  the  slipper,  but  it 
is  a  block  of  august  ice."  His  cries  to  Plum  Blossom  are  of 
no  avail.  In  this  last  extremity  she  cannot  answer  them,  but 
something  deeper  within  him  must  be  once  more  touched  before 
his  final  ascent  to  victory.  Once  more  he  must  taste  the  depth 
of  the  old  mother  love.  The  mother's  spirit  waiting  and  watch- 
ing its  hour  in  heaven  above  brings  through  her  prayer  the 


THE    NATURAL    PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  123 

warmth  into  his  world-body.  Yet  his  conscious  thought  is  not 
of  her.  The  mother  love  must  be  content  to  be  hidden  still  under 
her  sacrifice  to  the  younger  substitute,  wherein  lies  the  hero's 
final  step  into  freedom.  His  last  faint  warmth  of  life  has 
breathed  itself  into  the  name  of  Plum  Blossom,  which  remains 
a  melting  icicle  kiss  upon  his  lips.  His  first  waking  conscious- 
ness is  again  of  his  upward  journey:  "Lead  me  to  the  moun- 
tain top  one  august  step  above  that  I  may  see  the  world  of 
love  and  my  inner  self."  He  moves  on  dazzled  by  the  sun 
shining  glorious  above  him,  only  dreamily  conscious  of  his 
mother's  voice.  He  is  not  entirely  unmindful  however  of  the 
source  of  his  life  and  love,  for  one  little  gray  cloud  in  the 
huge  brass  bowl  of  the  sky  "  is  my  mother  soul  cloud.  So 
with  every  golden  shower  of  happiness  there  is  a  touch  of 
gray — for  one  must  pause  in  happiness  to  shed  a  tear  for  a 
mother  heavenward  passed." 

And  now  his  icy  fetters  melt  completely  away  and  he  has 
strength  and  courage  to  fling  himself  against  the  palace  gates. 
Before  such  courageous  resolve  the  weak  and  evil  powers  of 
selfishness  and  self  indulgence  beat  a  languid  but  safe  retreat. 
Step  by  step  as  the  conqueror  makes  his  entering  way  the  cow- 
ardly brother  smothers  one  valorous  boast  after  another  in  his 
"  inability  to  get  away "  until  he  is  quite  ready  at  the  hero's 
demand  to  "  bump  "  the  head  he  is  glad  to  retain  and  betake 
himself  to  his  self  chosen  prison,  "  A  garden !  A  garden  filled 
with  smiling  flowers."  Wu  Hoo  Git  ascends  at  last  the  throne  of 
his  ancestors,  robed  in  the  yellow  jacket,  "  the  sun-hued  garment  " 
which  marks  him  the  chosen  of  heaven  to  rule.  Once  more 
he  draws  forth  the  slipper  and  its  summons  completes  his 
triumph  and  his  entrance  into  the  fulness  of  life;  it  brings  his 
chosen  Plum  Blossom  to  his  side.  The  mother  is  not  present 
only  above,  as  an  inspiration  and  a  recognition  from  afar  that 
he  has  established  his  own  life's  kingdom.  It  is  her  voice  in 
the  distance,  "  The  world  and  wisdom  are  his." 

This  happy  retelling  of  the  CEdipus  story  carries  a  mental 
refreshment  and  a  stimulus  toward  the  ever-recurring  conflict 
between  the  individual  venture  forth  upon  the  path  of  reality, 


J24  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

which  is  the  price  of  progress,  and  the  pleasant  and  sheltering 
arms  of  phantasy,  which  would  keep  us  in  the  regressive  realm 
of  the  infantile.  Yet  through  all  the  light  fancifulness  of  the 
play  and  its  pleasing  presentation  one  is  reminded  of  the  crys- 
tallization of  this  CEdipus  constellation  in  the  nation  from  which 
the  theatrical  setting  is  borrowed.  To  be  sure  the  play  has 
elements,  such  as  a  certain  American  freedom  of  love  making, 
which  one  could  scarcely  find  in  Chinese  society  and  which 
seem  likewise  to  lie  far  remote  even  in  their  phantasy  life. 
That  they  do  exist  there,  however  imperfectly,  is  evidenced  by 
the  imaginative  qualities  which  can  transform  their  meager  stage 
equipments  into  a  richness  of  suggestion  which  fairly  rivals 
the  elaborate  devices  of  the  occidental  theater.  They  manifest 
themselves  also  in  the  wealth  of  symbolism  which  appears  not 
only  on  the  stage,  but  is  part  and  parcel  of  daily  life.  Never- 
theless, the  sordid  misery  and  poverty  of  life  in  that  vast  em- 
pire, republic  as  yet  only  in  name,  allows  but  little  healthful 
phantasy  play. 

It  would  seem  that  centuries  ago,  when  other  peoples  were 
voicing  the  great  fundamental  complex  in  the  projected  form 
of  ancestral  worship  which  gave  emotional  relief  and  therefore 
freedom  for  development  away  from  its  bondage,  China  for  some 
reason  allowed  it  to  run  into  a  fixed  mold  from  which  for 
all  these  centuries  there  has  been  no  escape.  It  stopped  for 
them  the  clock  of  time  and  left  them,  full  grown  then  and  ac- 
complished beyond  the  rest  of  the  world,  like  the  sleeping  figures 
in  the  enchanted  palace. 

The  cause  would  be  hard  to  seek  back  in  those  dim  centuries 
of  the  past.  The  results  are  apparent  in  the  wretched  lives  of 
hundreds  of  millions  of  people,  in  the  slavery  of  both  men  and 
women  to  the  one  family  ideal,  an  ideal  as  Sir  James  Legge 
has  said,  which  looks'  backward  and  not  forward,  in  the  stag- 
nation of  all  progress  which  has  marked  their  centuries  of 
history. 

The  family  complex  fetters  them.  They  have  never  passed 
beyond  ancestor  worship.  It  is  their  religion,  it  pervades  all 
government,  it  makes  or  rather  mars  their  family  life.  Slowly 


THE    NATURAL    PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION  125 

the  light  of  progress  is  touching  these  bonds,  but  the  great  nation 
is  yet  so  far  from  its  awakening  that  we  may  speak  of  the 
China  of  the  past  as  still  bound  and  barely  starting  on  the  quest 
for  its  own  life  which  urged  on  the  hero  of  the  play. 

Here  it  is  that  "  The  Yellow  Jacket "  is  so  true  to  the  Chinese 
life.  It  presents  very  clearly  and  definitely  these  features  of 
the  fundamental  complex  just  as  they  oppress  China  in  actuality. 
Its  Emperor  only  so  recently  was  indeed  the  "  Son  of  Heaven." 
The  president  still  sacrifices  to  Heaven — Shang-ti,  the  Supreme 
Ruler.  It  has  been  argued  for  them  that  they  were  monotheists 
par  excellence,  but  this  monotheism  manifests  itself  as  the  su- 
preme exaltation  of  the  great  divine  ruler.  It  is  this  idea  of 
power  and  authority  rather  than  of  any  other  character  which 
they  conceive  in  their  supreme  God.  In  practice  they  are  wor- 
shipers of  many  spirits,  but  most  conspicuously  of  the  ances- 
tral spirits.  Its  fruit  in  their  lives  testifies  to  the  unproductive- 
ness of  this  continuance  of  a  primitive  form  of  belief  so  many 
centuries  since  it  had  outworn  its  usefulness  in  the  advance 
of  culture  and  civilization.  It  proves  itself  a  regressive  attitude 
toward  life.  The  son  lives  for  the  father,  for  the  grandfather, 
for  the  shades  who  have  long  preceded  him.  Woman  has  no 
importance  save  as  she  may  be  the  instrument  for  raising  up 
sons,  not  for  succession  but  for  maintaining  the  recession  into 
the  past.  Everything  about  the  home  centers  around  male  pres- 
tige through  the  backward  gaze  not  the  forward  note  of  prog- 
ress and  hope  in  the  son.  Therefore,  the  son's  wife  becomes 
only  the  drudge  in  the  home,  the  helpless  slave  of  the  mother- 
in-law  who  toils  for  the  men.  Her  own  family  no  longer  have 
control  of  her.  Plum  Blossom's  pretty  rebellion  against  the 
mother-in-law  threatening  her  future  finds  many  a  darker  echo 
in  the  real  China.  Many  have  been  the  prospective  brides  who 
have  fulfilled  Plum  Blossom's  threat  and  chosen  death  rather 
than  the  dreaded  servitude. 

Filial  piety  is  extolled  in  China's  sacred  books  and  com- 
mended by  idealists,  but  actual  conditions  bear  truer  witness 
to  the  effect  of  such  enforced  retrogression.  Formal  worship 
and  compulsory  obedience  and  respect  do  not  lie  deep.  They 


I25  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

make  for  hatred,  quarreling,  wrangling,  Families  do  not  live 
at  peace  among  themselves.  The  empty  formality  of  a  phase  of 
human  development  dead  and  forsaken  by  other  nations  these 
thousands  of  years  produces  that  indifference  in  the  most  sacred 
things  which  so  astonishes  the  occidental  mind.  These  things 
are  as  hollow  as  their  loudly  extolled  filial  piety.  In  the  play 
the  "  property  man  "  appears  as  the  perfect  exponent  of  that. 
His  superb  indifference  to  the  bombast  of  boastfulness  or  pomp, 
of  heartrending  sorrow  or  exquisite  joy,  the  air  of  boredom 
and  disdain  with  which  he  can  set  up  mountains  for  the  hero 
to  climb  or  whisk  the  dust  from  the  chairs  on  which  their  high- 
nesses have  just  been  seated  finds  its  counterpart,  too,  in  the 
real  China.  The  untidy  priests  in  the  temples  care  as  little  for 
its  intrusion  by  curious  foreigner  or  careless,  unkempt  wor- 
shipper. They  can  as  unconcernedly  drink  their  tea  as  the 
"  property  man  "  could  turn  his  back  and  partake  of  his  bowl 
of  rice  and  let  great  events  take  their  own  course. 

This  is  a  dark  picture  of  the  land  itself.  Are  there  no  lighter 
elements  in  it?  Yes;  they  stir  to  laughter  and  to  delight  in  the 
play  and  to  wonder,  too,  at  what  may  be  their  significance.  They 
too  bear  the  character  of  infantile,  the  features  which  would 
appear  among  a  people  who  live  thus  in  the  past  and  must 
express  their  desires  and  impulses  in  that  concrete  form  which 
lies  so  much  nearer  the  remote  past  of  primitive  man. 

Noise,  racket,  and  din !  The  "  assistant  property  men  "  do 
their  best  and  the  "  God  of  Thunder  "  has  things  all  to  himself 
for  a  time,  yet  it  is  all  less  than  naught  to  the  rattling  and 
banging  with  which  China  itself  sounds  on  every  possible  oc- 
casion. Whether  or  not  the  Chinaman  has  lost  his  faith  in 
the  many  spirits  abroad  to  be  frightened  away  by  the  din,  the 
noise  is  an  indispensable  part  of  wedding  and  funeral,  of  feast 
day  and  fast  day,  of  welcome  and  godspeed,  not  one  salute  but 
all  that  gun  and  gong  can  combine,  with  firecrackers  demolished 
not  by  the  pack  or  the  bundle,  but  by  the  hundreds  massed 
together  in  a  manner  that  would  stupefy  the  Yankee  boy's  provi- 
dent soul.  Just  as  infantile  is  such  an  assertion  of  power 
as  are  the  methods  of  the  thunder  god  on  the  stage  who  thinks 


THE    NATURAL   PATH    OF    SUBLIMATION  127 

by  the  quantity  and  perhaps  quality  of  his  noise  to  overwhelm 
the  hero  and  turn  him  back  to  regressive  paths.  Thus  the  in- 
fant thinks  to  win  power  by  thunderous  noise  and  the  peculiar 
crude  get-up  of  the  thunder  god  with  his  black  and  yellow 
suggests  that  early  infantile  power  source  which  analysis  finds 
to  contain  so  much  attraction  in  the  unconscious  as  a  phantasy 
level,  the  black  and  yellow  of  the  dirt  or  fecal  level.  One 
wonders  whether  the  brown  covered  hills  sprinkled  with  black 
boulders  which  is  so  much  a  feature  of  their  natural  world, 
together  with  their  muddy  yellow  rivers,  may  not  have  helped 
to  fix  such  a  phantasy.  Surely,  the  Chinaman  feels  at  home 
in  the  dirt  layer.  Thread  the  narrow  streets  of  his  filthy  cities 
to  be  convinced;  stop  at  the  stalls  which  tempt  him — not  you — 
all  along  the  way  with  their  repeated  display  of  rich  fried  food, 
greasy  and  brown,  and  think  how  far  in  development  his  interest 
has  yet  to  rise. 

One  cannot  tarry  long,  however,  before  ready  Eastern  hos- 
pitality thrusts  upon  the  often  unwilling  guest  another  form 
of  native  delectation.  Insipid,  half  sweetened  cakes  vie  with 
sweetish,  brackish  teas  to  tempt  the  Chinese  epicure  and  puzzle 
the  analytic  foreigner  as  to  their  symbolic  value  to  the  Chinese 
mind.  It  is  true  to  the  expressive  symbolism  of  the  play  that 
the  all-powerful  ruler  and  his  "  honorable  second  father-in-law  " 
demand  the  honeysuckle  leaf  repeatedly  renewed  in  their  tea. 
Here  again  nature  has  assisted  the  Chinese  form  of  phantasy 
development  or  has  lent  herself  willingly  to  the  cultivation  of 
sources  of  phantasy  gratification.  The  fruit  which  they  brew 
with  their  tea  on  choice  occasions,  the  floating  honeysuckle  leaf 
or  the  orange  blossom,  bespeaks  the  concrete  representation  of 
the  seminal  fluid  which  lies  in  so  concrete  a  way  as  part  of 
their  love  phantasy  just  as  it  appears  in  the  archaic  symbolism 
of  the  dream  and  of  the  psychosis.  The  mystic  soma  of  the 
gods  is  to  them  perhaps  unconsciously  retained  in  their  common 
brews. 

The  sense  of  smell,  too,  finds  its  delight  in  the  cloying  sweets 
which  lie  so  close  to  the  sensuous  side  of  love.  We  know  the 
heavy  odor  of  their  sacred  lily,  which  must  blossom  at  least 


128 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 


once  a  year  in  every  home.  In  the  south  of  their  land  the 
pumelo  blossom  outrivals  the  orange  and  the  "seven  lee  fra- 
grance "  might  truly  be  thought  able  to  cling  to  and  follow  one 
for  the  distance  of  seven  "lee"  as  the  name  signifies. 

The  eye  likewise  seeks  the  direct  language  of  phantasy  ex- 
pressed in  telling  form.  The  laying  on  of  paint  and  powder 
in  frankly  heightened  artificiality  speaks  in  as  clear  characters 
as  the  manifest  symbolism  of  their  mode  of  written  speech. 
Painted  faces,  marvelous  coiffure,  which  denotes  a  woman's 
locality  and  to  some  extent  her  standing — no  woman  could  ap- 
pear in  public  respectably  without  some  or  many  ornaments 
thrust  through  her  hair — the  tiny  pointed  feet  barely  as  yet 
dispensed  with  as  a  mark  of  respectability  and  social  position, 
these  are  but  a  mere  mention  of  the  bewildering  symbolism 
by  which  this  strange  undeveloped  people  seek  self  expression 
and  manifest  their  as  yet  unassimilated  comprehension  of  life. 

No  wonder  that  the  "  Yellow  Jacket "  transports  one  into  an 
enchanting  dream  world  which,  however,  lacks  that  harmonizing 
atmosphere  which  advanced  culture  has  thrown  about  the  more 
concrete  pictures  of  the  primitive  and  childish  world.  In  this 
land  men  and  women  live  still  among  the  individual  objects  which 
appear  in  our  cruder  unsoftened  dreams  of  the  night,  where 
each  element  comes  and  goes  in  incoherent  confusion  and  be- 
wildering multiplicity  of  vivid  detail.  These  men  and  women 
are  closer,  as  the  night  dreams  are,  to  the  world  to  which  the 
psychotic  returns  for  whom  a  unifying  control  is  no  longer  ex- 
ercised by  the  reality  of  the  actual  century  in  which  he  lives. 

Thus  again  "  Daffodil,"  the  effeminate  rival  brother,  is  only 
perhaps  an  extreme  example  of  that  grade  of  partial  develop- 
ment which  magnifies  the  homosexual  or  "  homopsychic  "  ele- 
ment before  it  has  found  through  maturity  its  proper  sublima- 
tion. The  long,  enveloping  robes  of  the  Chinaman,  garment 
upon  garment,  of  soft  silken  texture  and  rich  or  delicate,  which 
marks  the  pride  and  taste  of  the  well-to-do  gentleman,  suggest 
that  his  virility  is  considerably  obscured  behind  elements  which 
have  not  as  yet  reached  their  full  evolution.  His  tendency  to 
go  softly  and  speak  softly  likewise  exaggerate  this  same  partial 


THE    NATURAL   PATH    OF   SUBLIMATION 

stage  behind  which  capacity  for  development  still  lies  partly 
dormant. 

More  robust  elements  have  not  however  been  wanting  and 
recently  signs  more  abundant  of  their  awakening  to  a  fuller 
development.  In  the  last  decade  or  two  the  touching  of  hands 
more  and  more  practically  and  vitally  with  the  nations  of  prog- 
ress has  not  only  stimulated  them.  It  has,  furthermore,  dis- 
covered those  traits  in  them  which  make  for  strength.  There 
is  promise  of  a  mighty  synthesis  of  that  multiplicity  of  symbolism 
in  which  it  will  lose  the  character  of  its  individual  features  and 
merge  them  rather  into  a  full-grown  progressiveness — when 
they  have  broken  the  fetter  of  the  past.  They  have  yet  to  learn 
to  close  the  gateway  which,  according  to  Bergson,  should  shut 
away  the  past,  admitting  just  enough  of  it  at  any  moment  as 
will  further  the  action  of  that  moment.  Virile  and  steadfast 
advance  along  the  path  of  progress  lies  in  their  future. 

The  hero  who  wins  the  yellow  jacket,  a  refined  harmony  of 
tints,  very  different  from  the  base  yellow  which  clothed  the 
thunder  god — is  the  figure  of  China's  promise.  He  typifies  the 
strength  and  resource  that  He  almost  untouched,  untried  in  its 
vast  area.  Not  only  its  natural  wealth  untold,  but  the  vigor 
of  growth  which  covers  the  brown  hills  wherever  the  soil  is 
tilled  are  suggestive  of  such  a  future.  No  other  green  is  so 
richly  vivid  as  its  velvety  fields  of  rice  which  change  the  dark 
hillside.  Its  luxuriant  groves  of  bamboo  spring  up  as  if  by 
magic.  The  yellow  sands  of  its  river  banks  and  fertile  valleys, 
its  stretches  of  mountain  land  have  their  growth  of  grain  or 
forest.  And  above  its  cloying  scented  flowers  the  scentless  wild 
rose  climbs  high  and  the  flaming  hibiscus  flaunts  a  note  of 
power  to  come  rich  and  warm  with  the  fulness  of  an  unfettered 
life. 


CHAPTER    IX. 
THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  1 

"  Swift,  through  some  trap  mine  eyes  have  never  found 

Dim-panelled  in  the  painted  scene  of  Sleep, 

Thou,  giant  Harlequin  of  Dreams,  dost  leap 

Upon  my  spirit's  stage.    Then  Sight  and  Sound, 

Then  Space  and  Time,  then  Language,  Mete  and  Bound, 

And  all  familiar  Forms  that  firmly  keep 

Man's  reason  in  the  road,  change  faces,  peep 

Betwixt  the  legs  and  mock  the  daily  round. 

Yet  thou  canst  more  than  mock:  sometimes  my  fears 

At  midnight  break  through  bounden  lids — a  sign 

Thou  hast  a  heart:  and  oft  thy  little  leaven 

Of  dream-taught  wisdom  works  me  bettered  years. 

In  one  night  witch,  saint,  trickster,  fool  divine, 

I  think  thou'rt  Jester  at  the  Court  of  Heaven !  " 

SIDNEY  LANIER,  The  Harlequin  of  Dreams. 

Freud  has  called  the  dream  the  "  royal  road  into  the  uncon- 
scious "  and  brought  into  service  one  of  the  most  commonplace 
factors  of  human  life  as  a  means  for  searching  into  life's  con- 
flicts. The  dream  is  such  a  universal  and  ordinary  ocurrence 
in  every  life  that  it  appears,  to  the  unthinking,  foolish  and  mean- 
ingless. Regulated  conscious  thought,  hard  at  work  for  cen- 
turies upon  centuries  trying  to  subdue  and  control  the  wayward- 
ness of  actual  wishes  and  strivings  which  tend  to  outrun  all 
control,  has  condemned  dreams  as  foolish,  mad,  useless,  for- 
getting that  they  were  once  regarded  more  seriously  when  the 
world  was  younger  and  thought  was  still  more  candid,  before 
"  camouflage  "  became  a  universal  fine  art.  And  they  may  still 
be  utilized  to  penetrate  the  inner  life,  its  wishes  and  strivings. 
Here  again  the  artistic  creator  with  his  quicker,  more  active 
1  Printed  in  the  New  York  Medical  Journal,  Apr.  5,  1919,  under  t  tie : 
"Dear  Brutus":  The  Dramatist's  Use  of  the  Dream.  J.  M.  Barrie: 
Dear  Brutus. 

130 


THE   HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  13! 

intuition  comes  into  closer  touch  with  the  unconscious  and  brings 
its  content  to  conscious  attention.  It  is  fitting  therefore  that 
his  happy  exposition  of  the  science  of  the  dream  should  be  in- 
cluded in  this  study. 

In  Dear  Brutus  the  genius  of  James  M.  Barrie  has  spoken 
very  directly  and  clearly  of  the  service  which  the  dream  may 
render  for  the  understanding  not  only  of  one's  inner  life,  but 
for  its  readjustment  and  rehabilitation.  Whether  from  conscious 
intention  or  from  the  deeper  truth  of  artistic  intuition,  he  has 
portrayed  its  actual  service  in  the  redemption  of  life  from  sad- 
dening waste  and  bitterest  dissatisfaction.  Barrie,  in  his  wisdom 
and  humor,  stands  between  the  scoffing  multitude  who  see  only 
the  foolishness  of  dreams  and  their  apparent  freakish  triviality, 
and  the  serious  psychopathologist  who  considers  them,  in  their 
functional  import,  worthy  of  earnest  investigation.  He  lets  his 
little  old  Lob,  so  akin  to  Lanier's  Harlequin  of  Dreams,  break 
the  bonds  of  rhyme  and  reason  as  he  appears  upon  the  stage 
to  set  the  dream  work  in  motion.  Some  words  overheard  one 
night  at  the  theater  before  the  play  had  proceeded  far  paid 
genuine  tribute  to  the  dramatist's  intuition.  "  It  certainly  must 
have  been  some  lunatic  that  wrote  this  play."  A  wise  lunatic,  yes ! 
One  who  has  the  wisdom  and  the  courage  of  the  deeper  hidden 
truth  to  see  in  all  the  mad  gambols  which  far  outreach  care- 
fully circumscribed  conscious  thought,  something  human,  some- 
thing seeking  expression,  something  from  the  inner  heart  of 
man  and  woman  where  both  difficulty  and  success  are  con- 
ditioned and  determined.  But  this  "  lunatic  "  has  also  in  richer 
measure  than  the  ordinary  man  the  large  wisdom  and  control  to 
bring  meaning  and  order  and  service  out  of  the  lunacy  of  the 
dream. 

First  of  all  there  is  Lob.  The  dream  world  has  nothing  to 
do  with  "  Space  and  Time  .  .  .  and  all  familiar  Forms." 
The  stream  of  the  unconscious  from  which  dreams  appear,  re- 
leased from  the  too  highly  vaunted  intellectual  repression  of 
reason  which  holds  them  in  check  during  the  humdrum  hours 
of  waking,  belongs  to  all  the  ages  since  life  began.  Therefore 
Lob  is  ageless  or  of  all  the  ages.  He  has  no  memory  of  timed 


j-2  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

events,  of  years  measured  in  brief  periods.  He  was  just  as 
active  when  "  Merrie  England  "  flourished  and  the  "  philomel  " 
sang  its  song  of  love,  as  when  the  nightingale  of  today  melts 
away  with  its  melody  the  dividing  barriers  which  conscious 
thought  calls  time.  Lob— his  little  simple  name  rings  its  changes 
through  many  tongues — is  no  forgotten  and  discarded  past.  Lob, 
love,  life,  libido,  belongs  to  the  measureless  unconscious  life 
of  man,  the  preservation  of  its  power,  impulse,  striving,  and 
he  moves  and  flits  and  plans  and  makes  things  come  to  pass 
out  in  the  external  conscious  world  as  well.  He  is  power,  real 
vital  dynamic  force,  love  and  life,  creative,  constructive  energy. 
It  is  a  stultifying  blindness,  a  superficial  timid  aloofness  from 
the  stream  of  knowledge  and  power  within,  which  breeds  dis- 
content, misunderstanding,  false  control  of  our  unseen  desires, 
or  loss  of  control  and  wasteful  drifting. 

These  things  have  moved  Lob's  deeper  heart  to  bring  certain 
poor,  blind  time  servers  to  his  house  for  the  magic  Midsummer 
Night.  Keenly  urgent  and  alive  but  warily  cautious  of  opening 
upon  them  this  flood  of  possibility,  he  suggests  and  only  half 
pretends  that  there  is  any  marvelous  plan  before  them.  But 
he  yearns  inexpressibly  to  bring  them  at  least  into  touch  with 
the  real  profound  life  within  them,  and  it  may  be  that  some 
will  respond.  He  is  subtle  and  quiet,  as  little  to  be  thwarted 
as  is  the  stream  of  life  itself.  He  hides  the  intensity  of  his 
purpose  by  whimsicality,  as  securely  as  life  itself  hides  and 
only  half  discloses  its  sure,  still  purposes.  The  flowers  grow 
for  him.  He  has  only  to  stand  before  them  and  they  are  as  if 
coaxed  to  unfold.  And  if  they  fall  and  break,  as  happens  when 
he  drops  them  from  the  vase,  they  are  not  cast  out  as  useless. 
Like  life  in  its  true  course,  he  is  wiser  and  more  tender  than 
that.  They  can  be  readjusted,  rewatered,  the  broken  one  is 
reestablished,  some  of  its  stem  is  lost  but  it  is  encouraged  to 
stand  up  and  still  prove  bright  and  serviceable  among  the  others ; 
just  as  good  in  a  new  way,  if  only  the  new  way  is  cheerfully 
and  resolutely  accepted.  This  is  his  simple  childlike  prattle  to 
them.  This  vigorous  little  Lob,  whom  even  a  stupidly  blinking, 
visionless  old  butler  cannot  sucessfully  put  to  bed  and  to  sleep, 


THE   HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  133 

he  it  is  who  holds  in  his  hand  the  rousing  of  all  these  souls 
to  their  own  possibilities.  Yet  even.  Lob  is  tremulous,  not  sure. 
So  is  life.  It  has  only  its  possibilities;  what  shall  be  done  with 
these,  what  shall  be  made  of  the  dreams  of  sleeping  or  of  wak- 
ing, even  life  cannot  say.  Each  individual  makes  his  own  choice, 
whether  or  not  he  shall  fulfil  these  possibilities  for  himself. 

Lob  yearns  over  them  all  but  mostly  over  the  two,  Mr.  Dearth 
and  Mrs.  Dearth,  in  whom,  though  they  have  drifted  sadly 
astray,  he  knows  lies  the  greater  possibility  of  the  right  turning. 
Particularly  he  sees  the  power  that  might  lie  in  the  hand  of  the 
woman.  She  has  turned  blindly  from  it,  blaming  only  her 
husband,  the  rejected  object  of  her  opportunity,  for  the  things 
which  have  gone  wrong  for  them  both.  Lob  is  almost  afraid 
to  have  her  enter  the  realm  of  dreams  and  face  the  baseness 
and  disaster  of  her  own  inner  desires,  in  the  facing  of  which 
nevertheless  alone  lies  her  "  second  chance." 

In  the  first  act  all  have  been  waiting  and  wondering  what 
is  in  Lob's  mind  concerning  them.  He  himself  is  scarcely  sure 
even  yet  that  the  magic  wood  of  dreams  will  be  there  on  this 
Midsummer  Night,  but  it  is  closer  than  any  one  of  them  would 
have  imagined.  The  radiant  growing  garden  of  the  day  has 
given  place  to  the  mystic  dream  world.  No  one  suspects  that 
it  is  so  close.  The  curtain  had  been  drawn  before  the  flower 
garden  while  the  scene  of  perfidious  lovemaking  between  the 
philanderers  was  taking  place.  Now  it  is  suddenly  withdrawn 
and  the  magic  wood  is  there.  The  waiting  guests  look  at  it 
and  at  one  another  in  wonder,  awed,  questioning,  afraid  of  that 
"  second  chance,"  yet  drawn  one  by  one  irresistibly  into  the 
strange  secrets  of  the  wood,  their  own  secrets  and  their  own 
renewed  opportunities.  The  drunken  artist  is  the  first  to  enter 
it,  he  who  had  awakened  the  pity  of  all  the  company  and  who 
together  with  his  wife  had  particularly  stirred  Lob's  yearning 
heart.  His  life  is  the  visibly  wasted  one,  force  and  initiative 
gone.  He  is  too  broken  and  ashamed  to  do  other  than  meekly 
accept  the  reproach  and  censure  of  his  embittered  wife.  That  her 
selfishness  and  hardness  have  repelled  and  defeated  his  creative 
power  she  has  yet  to  learn;  but  the  darkness  and  emptiness 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

of  the  desires  which  will  constitute  her  dream  do  well  to  make 
her  hesitate  fearfully,  before  she  steps  into  the  wood  for  her 
second  chance. 

Meawhile  the  others  have  gone.  Lady  Caroline,  gowned  in 
gold  of  a  glittering  sheen,  scornful,  proud,  in  the  haughtiness 
of  a  gilded  snobbery,  sails  majestically  into  the  forest's  glades. 
Mr.  Coade,  easy,  polished,  blessed  with  an  affluence  and  no  need 
for  exertion,  follows  the  spell  of  whatever  may  be  for  him. 
The  triangular  lovers  —  the  man  whose  mind  stays  made  up 
hardly  longer  than  its  object  of  choice  is  in  sight,  the  girl  flattered 
by  his  attentions  and  the  plausibility  of  his  self  conceit,  and  the 
bright  eyed  little  wife  who  was  looking  around  for  her  husband's 
love  which  she  feared  she  had  lost  and  some  one  might  have 
picked  up — these  three  follow  each  other  in  quick  succession  to 
see  what  the  wood  may  do  in  revealing  their  true  desires.  Even 
Matey,  the  dishonest  butler,  sets  ponderously  forth,  hardly  so 
much  impressed  by  his  second  chance,  as  compelled  to  the  self 
revealing  dream,  whether  he  will  or  no.  Only  Mrs.  Coade, 
comfortably,  placidly  happy,  remains  behind,  upstairs,  far  from 
even  the  suggestion  of  the  mystery  of  the  wood  of  dreams.  Her 
day  has  gone  by.  There  is  no  more  creativeness  to  her  love, 
no  more  inspiration  and  vision.  She  has  settled  all  too  soon 
to  the  biological  running  down  of  the  sands  and  is  no  longer 
eager  for  a  stimulus  to  herself.  Nor  does  she  offer  an  incentive 
to  her  husband,  which  might  have  saved  his  dream  from  its  in- 
eptitude and  revealed  some  keener  desire  than  that  which  he 
has  to  acknowledge  in  the  end  as  his.  So  Mrs.  Coade  merely 
haunts  the  house  during  the  night,  candle  in  hand,  anxious  in 
regard  to  the  others,  but  to  no  avail.  For  the  house  is  deserted 
by  the  adventurers  and  only  Lob  slumbers  on  at  his  chimney 
side,  patiently  awaiting  the  working  of  his  dream  experiment. 

But  the  wood,  what  is  transpiring  there?  Psychoanalysis  in 
its  persistent  working  with  dreams  has  found  that  for  practical 
therapeutic  purposes  they  may  be  viewed  in  at  least  two  aspects. 
First,  they  are  the  means  of  revealing  to  conscious  attention, 
fixed  upon  them  after  awaking,  inner  complexities  which  un- 
known desires  create  in  our  lives.  This  demands  the  revelation 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  135 

which  their  detailed  whimsicalities,  with  the  aid  and  the  disguise 
of  symbolisms,  so  cunningly  set  forth.  They  are  often  startling, 
in  spite  of  clever  disguises,  in  the  secret  desires,  the  pettiness, 
the  primitiveness,  the  childishness,  the  baseness  of  interest  which 
they  reveal  still  at  work  beneath  the  surface  of  what  we  term 
a  civilized,  cultured,  adult  mind.  They  show  the  source  of  the 
confusion,  the  uncertainty  of  striving,  and  the  indecision  as  due  to 
the  variety  of  desires  and  of  the  different  cultural  layers  to  which 
such  desires  belong,  which  are  at  all  times  present  within  us. 
The  dream,  however,  has  a  further  function,  a  further  message. 
Out  of  these  desires  and  out  of  the  clearer  revelation  of  them 
it  aids  the  mind  in  its  choice  and  control  of  these  to  higher  syn- 
theses. It  reveals  better  possibilities  and  sets  one  on  the  correct 
pathway  of  synthesis  and  control  which  will  attain  these  and 
unify  life.  Bearing  in  mind  then  this  double  function  of  the 
dream,  we  need  not  be  surprised  with  whatever  Barrie's  play 
may  reveal  to  us.  Like  the  analyst  with  his  patient,  he  must 
first  draw  the  curtain  from  the  desires  in  their  nakedness,  high 
or  low,  base  or  noble,  and  then  lead  gradually  to  the  conscious 
grasping  of  them,  the  slow,  at  first  bewildered,  acceptance  of 
them,  and  then  the  determined  use  of  the  acquired  knowledge 
of  self ;  or  shall  it  be  only  the  continuance  in  a  life  of  indolent, 
indifferent  drifting?  Even  in  the  latter  case,  however,  some 
impetus  and  concern  will  have  arisen  from  the  dreaming.  Some 
"  little  leaven  of  dream-taught  wisdom "  work  them  "  bettered 
years." 

Since  there  is  a  power  in  the  dream  to  discover  unsuspected 
realities  of  desire  partly  hidden,  partly  revealed  by  the  symbolic 
actions,  manners,  dress  of  ordinary  conscious  life,  it  need  oc- 
casion no  surprise  to  find  first  in  the  wood  the  haughty  Lady 
Caroline  madly  in  love  with  Matey  the  butler.  He  sleeps  with 
his  head  pillowed  in  her  lap.  Her  glittering,  golden  gown  is 
exchanged  for  motoring  garments  hardly  less  suggestive  of  the 
sordid  affluence  which  her  prosperous  dream  husband  has 
brought  her  in  the  financial  success  which  has  also  satisfied  his 
dreams.  Their  position  upon  the  ground,  from  which  they  are 
separated  only  by  the  luxurious  rug  from  the  "  Rolls-Royce " 


136 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 


left  somewhere  near,  is  all  indicative  of  the  low  position  of 
their  desires.  There  is  no  inspiration  or  aspiration  in  either 
of  them.  The  fat,  clumsy  Matey  limits  her  horizon  with  his 
boasting  of  his  clever  dealings  in  the  "  world  of  finance."  Even 
she  is  not  in  his  vision.  The  fat  brown  cigar  tempts  him  far 
more  than  the  request  to  kiss  her  ring,  her  "golden  fetter," 
and  his  thoughts  are  only  on  the  baser  accruing  of  wealth  and 
the  circumventing  of  the  rest  of  the  world  of  finance  by  his 
schemes.  No,  the  dream  could  not  change  his  baseness  of  desire 
and  method  of  dishonesty.  His  striving  for  power  develops 
no  more  than  merely  to  substitute  one  base  form  for  another. 
And  it  keeps  "the  nails  in  my  boots  for  those  beneath  me." 

The  philanderer  had  already  given  a  picture,  before  he  entered 
the  wood,  of  the  end  of  his  desires.  He  is  one  of  those  in- 
dividuals who  see  no  further  than  the  horizon  of  the  self,  such 
a  Narcissus  that  his  own  image  fills  the  pool  of  events  quite 
completely  and  quite  entrancingly.  Joanna,  the  love  of  the  mo- 
ment, or  Mabel  the  wife,  one  time  loved,  are  only  objects  upon 
which  the  narcissistic  self  reflection  shines  forth.  So  in  the 
first  act,  still  in  the  waking  world,  Joanna  attempts  to  love  and 
admire  him  but  his  love  for  her  is  only  a  boastful  rehearsal 
of  his  own  graces  of  spirit,  his  own  loneliness  and  separateness 
of  soul.  These  are  just  so  many  rich  mouthfuls  of  self  appre- 
ciation and  conceit,  the  enjoyment  of  the  feigned  loneliness  and 
regretfulness  oozing  through  with  an  unctuousness  which  de- 
ceives the  very  man  himself.  It  is  the  essence  of  egotistic  self 
pity  which  masochistically  suffers  to  enjoy.  And  for  a  time 
it  deceives  the  equally  selfish  Joanna.  Mabel's  vision  is  rather 
keener.  She  is  a  contrast  to  these  too  common  types  of  thickly 
blinded  self  worshippers  and  deceivers.  Quick,  alert,  she  is 
able  to  pick  up  a  situation  as  tangled  and  absurd  as  it  is  dis- 
astrous to  her  comfort  and  contentment,  and  in  sprightly  fashion 
make  the  best  even  of  it.  Certain  flashes  of  spiteful  hatred 
come  through,  however,  to  place  her  among  the  ordinary  and 
imperfect  members  of  human  society. 

In  the  wood  the  situation  of  these  lovers  is  reversed.  The 
dream  seems  to  be  devoted  principally  to  clearing  the  air  a 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  137 

little  for  the  man,  John  Purdie,  and  awaken  him  somewhat 
from  his  extreme  egotism.  He  is  still  pursuing  the  wrong 
woman,  so  it  appears  to  him  in  the  dream,  and  so  he  enjoys 
still  the  flavor  of  the  forbidden  and  attainable  only  by  clan- 
destine means,  but  in  reality  his  fickleness  and  lack  of  stability 
evidence  themselves  in  that  he  pursues  his  wife  and  deserts 
the  other  woman,  thinking  his  wife  the  forbidden  object. 
His  methods  are  none  the  less  self  worshipful  and  reveal  that 
his  blindness  to  the  object  is  one  deeply  rooted  in  the  egotism 
of  his  nature.  Of  course  the  object  must  be  nothing  when  self 
is  all  and  fills  the  horizon.  "  You  know  why  I  love  you,  Mabel ; 
because  you  are  so  much  like  myself."  Joanna's  triumph  while 
awake  and  her  surprise  at  Mabel's  lack  of  appreciation  of  the 
self  engrossed  viewpoint  which  is  hers  and  Purdie's  are  now 
reversed  and  the  falseness  and  shallowness  of  her  obscured 
judgments  come  to  her  in  their  true  light.  It  is  her  turn  to 
indulge  in  little  wrathful  explosions,  most  sharply  at  the  last 
toward  "  philomel "  in  the  trees  over  her  head,  that  bird  of 
love  whose  true  nature  she  little  knew.  Mabel  has  shifted  her 
pale  gown  of  desertion  for  a  vividly  bright  one,  warm  and 
eloquent  of  love. 

Coade  has  not  attained  the  life  of  usefulness  which  his  waking 
anticipation  of  a  second  chance  had  conceived  for  him.  Ah,  no; 
he  has  escaped  the  comfortable  unstimulating  partner  of  his 
daily  life  only  to  pipe  and  dance  in  idle,  careless  self  enjoyment. 
He  has  returned  in  play  only  to  the  childish  level  which  lurks 
in  the  unconscious,  ready,  the  moment  the  ordinary  pressure 
of  the  daily  life  is  released,  to  summon  to  autoerotic  pleasure. 
This  is  easy  of  attainment,  requires  no  effort,  fills  the  place  all 
too  readily  of  the  creative  power  which  should  have  supplanted 
it  more  securely  than  this.  Neverthless  he  is  as  happy  and 
merry  and  pleasurably  unconcerned  as  only  dreams  can  permit 
one  to  be. 

The  others,  however,  those  upon  whom  Lob's  wish  had  most 
seriously  bent  itself,  how  does  it  fare  with  them?  The  wish 
for  true  living,  that  which  is  sincerely  happy  because  it  expresses 
itself  untrammeled  in  the  genuine  constructive  force  of  its  na- 


138 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 


ture,  must  have  been  alive  in  the  poor  drunken  artist  at  least. 
The'  dream  wood  has  released  him  from  the  weaknesses,  the 
ineffectually,  the  external  disappointments  which  had  turned  his 
natural  energy  from  the  paths  of  success  and  work.  Here  in 
the  wood  he  has  found  both  of  these.  Energy  has  not  wasted 
itself  here  in  pathways  which  bring  neither  complete  forget- 
fulness  nor  afford  any  of  the  satisfaction  which  life  really 
demands.  Now  the  artist  is  an  artist,  presumably  rising  betimes 
in  the  morning  as  the  man  awake  had  regretfully  stated  he 
used  to  do.  In  the  dream  he  is  out  even  to  seize  the  spell  of 
the  full  moon  and  make  it  his  for  definite  productive  ends.  And 
with  him  is  the  daughter  who  is  chief  symbol  of  the  creative 
power  and  wish,  the  daughter  whom  the  selfish,  hardened  un- 
productiveness of  his  wife  has  in  reality  denied  him. 

This  scene  of  consummate  dream  art,  so  replete  with  the  grace 
and  power  of  the  dramatist's  thought,  cannot  be  easily  passed 
by.  To  go  back  a  bit,  Barrie  has  confessed  in  the  sketch  of  his 
mother,  "  Margaret  Ogilvy,"  something  of  what  she  had  meant 
to  his  life  and  what  a  prominent  place  she  held  in  all  his  creative 
work.  She  constantly  reappeared  by  name  or  otherwise  in  his 
best  female  characters.  It  is  not  strange  therefore  that  this  wish 
daughter  should  bear  the  name  of  Margaret.  Furthermore 
psychoanalysis  has  been  teaching  us  the  lasting  and  dominating 
influence  upon  all  of  one's  later  life,  and  largely  conditioning 
its  success  or  failure,  which  the  love  of  a  child  toward  its  parent 
may  have.  Life's  success  or  failure  depends  upon  the  attitude 
formed  then.  This  expresses  itself  in  a  fixation  upon  the  parent, 
which  means  introversion,  dependence,  inability  to  meet  life  in 
one's  own  strength  and  effort,  or  on  the  other  hand  the  parent 
love  becomes  only  the  inspiring  model  for  all  of  later  life,  urging 
to  extroversion  upon  external  things  and  an  adult  acceptance 
and  use  of  love  and  all  other  opportunities  that  life  may  bring. 
Barrie  himself  has  said  that  "  nothing  that  happens  after  we  are 
twelve  matters  very  much."  Furthermore  we  have  the  testimony 
from  the  life  of  one  of  our  great  anatomists  as  to  the  hold  of 
the  mother  upon  the  child's  life  and  its  return  through  the 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  139 

undying  wish  in  the  form  of  a  daughter.  Burdach1  relates  his 
intense  experiences  in  the  birth  and  life  of  his  daughter  to  whom 
he  gave  his  mother's  name  and  whom  he  allowed  to  supplant 
a  strong  fixed  affection  and  desire  toward  his  idolized  mother 
who  had  died  earlier.  The  wife  in  his  narrative  seems  to  have 
been  only  a  secondary  consideration. 

It  would  seem  that  the  dramatist  has  here  laid  emphasis  even 
if  only  intuitively  and  unconsciously  upon  a  combination  of 
factors  grown  very  familiar  to  psychoanalysis.  They  are  given 
simply  in  the  drama:  the  artist  who  has  failed  in  his  work, 
whose  life  for  some  reason  has  not  attained  its  freedom  and 
has  instead  sought  refuge  in  the  often  frequented  port  decanter. 
He  has  been  unable  to  command  and  hold  the  love  of  the  wife, 
whose  wild  untamed  beauty  had  at  first  fascinated  him.  His 
deep  inner  desire,  which  perhaps  had  formed  the  unconscious 
fetters  which  had  caused  this  failure  and  his  disastrous  career, 
returns  in  the  dream  in  the  daughter  form,  whom  Barrie  con- 
fessedly suggests  as  a  revived  mother  image  when  he  gives  her 
his  own  mother's  name.  And  yet  the  dramatist's  art,  no  less 
than  his  creative  and  reconstructive  purpose,  which  is  thus  ar- 
tistically to  point  the  way  out  from  fixation  and  failure  to 
renewed  living,  utilizes  this  same  daughter-mother  figure  to 
reinspire  the  artist  and  lead  him  to  rebirth.  Such  is  the  mis- 
sion of  the  dream;  it  reveals  the  danger  side  of  the  unconscious 
wish  but  its  constructive,  "  prospective "  tendency  as  well.  It 
is  the  thought  to  which  Jung  has  given  elaboration  in  his 
Psychology  of  the  Unconscious,  in  which  he  discusses  the  "  ter- 
rible "  mother  object  of  the  infantile  desire  leading  to  death  and 
the  lif egiving  mother  from  whom  comes  the  psychic  rebirth,  "  the 
mother,  who  is  the  continuous  and  inexhaustible  source  of  life 
for  the  creator,  but  death  for  the  cowardly,  timid  and  sluggish." 

The  artist's  dream  makes  much  of  the  moonlight,  which 
Sadger2  has  shown  from  his  psychoanalytical  experience  and 
from  literature  has  much  to  do  also  with  parent  influences,  often 

1  Cited  by  J.  Sadger  in  "  Sleep  Walking  and  Moon  Walking."     Nerv- 
ous   and    Mental    Disease    Monograph    Series,    No.    30.     New    York    and 
Washington. 

2  Locus  cit. 


I40  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

associated  by  the  child  mind  with  the  light  of  the  moon,  and 
surviving  from  childhood  into  adult  life.  Barrie  has  added  a 
further  touch  from  his  childhood  memories  when  the  artist  and 
the  dream  child  are  engrossed  in  catching  the  full  expression 
of  the  moon  for  his  picture.  The  playful  references  of  both 
child  and  father  are  strongly  suggestive  of  the  influences  which 
Sadger's  study  has  discovered  operative  in  these  associations  in 
the  unconscious  and  conscious  phantasy  life  and  the  erotic  in- 
terpretation of  the  moon.  Then  the  dream  daughter  turns  her 
head  up  saucily  and  .delivers  her  address  to  the  moon  which 
savors  of  the  erotic  fancies  which  have  been  addressed  to  the 
moon  or  conceived  of  it  throughout  all  the  ages.  But  when 
the  maiden  wonders  if  the  moon  would  feel  insulted  at  being 
possibly  considered  old  enough  to  be  her  mother,  the  light 
hearted  artist's  answer  comes  straight  from  Barrie's  own  mother 
reminiscences.  He  has  told  us  how  Margaret  Ogilvy  was  wont 
to  borrow  his  school  boy  Latin  phrases  and  surprise  those  who 
complimented  her  daughter.  "  Would  it  not  be  more  to  the  point 
to  say,  '0  mater,  pulchra  filia  pulchriorf"  which  the  father 
in  the  play  offers  as  a  rejoinder  to  the  moon  to  defend  her 
youthfulness,  translating  it  into,  "  O  moon,  who  art  more  beau- 
tiful than  any  twopenny  ha'  penny  daughter." 

One  might  well  linger  over  this  brightly  tender  scene.  Its 
artistic  interest  is  great,  its  psychological  depth  no  less.  It 
touches  the  hearty,  healthy  wish  and  energy,  alive  in  the  deepest 
life  of  the  artist,  which  outwardly  and  practically  had  gone  so 
far  astray.  It  reveals  the  eager,  half  timid,  wholly  venturesome 
straining  of  the  child  to  enlarge  her  love  and  yearnings  out 
into  womanhood.  Imperiously  her  power  exercises  itself  upon 
the  father,  who  has  no  choice  but  to  yield  to  her  will.  Yet  she 
has  been  molded,  unwittingly,  unconsciously  guided  and  formed 
by  him.  Even  the  shape  of  her  ears  are  his  handiwork,  and 
significant  again  of  the  keen  association  between  the  child's 
night  phantasies  and  loving  parental  care  is  the  recall  of  her 
earliest  recollection,  the  vision  of  the  star,  which  also  she  learns 
her  father  had  planned  for  her  first  consciously  retained  mem- 
ory. Then  she  steps  out  cautiously  into  the  woman's  sphere 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  14! 

and  tests  her  own  valuation  of  a  son  setting  it  over  against  her 
father's  exclusive  estimate  of  a  daughter.  "  Dearth :  '  Daughters 
are  the  thing.  .  .  .  Sons  are  not  worth  having,  Margaret. 
Signed.  W.  Dearth,'  "  and  Margaret  responds :  "  'But  if  you 
were  a  mother,  dad.  .  .  .  Sons  are  not  so  bad.  Signed. 
M.  Dearth.' "  Then,  as  they  proceed :  "  Margaret :  '  Daddy,  now 
you  are  thinking  about — about  my  being  in  love  some  day/  He 
nods.  '  I  won't,  you  know ;  no,  never !  Oh,  I've  quite  decided. 
So  don't  be  afraid/  At  back  of  him — whispers,  '  Will  you 
hate  him  at  first,  Daddy  ? ' '  It  is  the  privilege  of  the  dream 
to  be  at  once  so  candid  and  so  contradictory  as  Dearth  when 
he  answers  to  the  repeated  question,  "  '  Would  you  hate  him  at 
first  ? '  '  I  hope  not.  I  should  want  to  strangle  him,  but  I  should 
not  hate  him.'  " 

A  cloud,  an  intimation  from  the  real  world  where  this  happi- 
ness of  the  wood  has  not  come  to  pass,  darkens  the  brightness 
of  the  moonlit  wood.  Mrs.  Dearth  appears,  the  mother  who 
had  failed  to  bear  this  child  and  make  this  happiness  a  reality. 
Her  dreams  have  revealed  the  disastrous  wishes  which  lay 
within  her.  She  is  ragged,  hungry,  wretched.  Her  ambition 
has  been  gratified ;  she  bears  the  name  of  the  Hon.  Mrs.  Finch- 
Fallowes  but  she  is  forsaken.  She  has  proved  the  truth  of 
her  husband's  warning  words  in  the  waking  world  at  which 
she  scoffed,  and  she  has  found  that  the  Hon.  Mr.  Finch-Fallowes 
is  a  "  rotter/'  Starving  and  hunting  for  bits  which  the  tourists 
may  have  left  between  the  roots  of  the  trees,  she  is  glad  to 
accept  the  aid  which  the  artist  and  his  daughter  give  her  from 
their  scanty  means.  The  thought  of  her  preys  upon  the  happi- 
ness of  the  artist's  mind,  even  as  the  wood  darkens  after  she 
conies  and  goes,  and  he  sets  off  in  the  direction  of  a  light  he 
sees  in  the  distance  to  procure  her  food.  He  sings  as  he  goes 
expecting  to  return  in  a  few  moments  to  the  dear  little  daughter, 
but  she  is  only  a  dream,  and  with  her  frightened  cry  darkness 
completely  swallows  up  the  wood  of  the  dream :  "  Daddy,  dad- 
dy, daddy,  daddy,  daddy.  Come  back,  come  back,  daddy!  I 
don't  want  to  be  a  might  have  been !  " 

One  needs  to  have  learned  to  take  dreams  somewhat  seriously 
to  appreciate  fully  the  waking  up  from  the  night  in  the  wood. 


.A9  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

142 

Barrie  has  skillfully  pictured  the  perplexing  transition  when 
the  world  of  the  unconscious  only  slowly  yields  to  the  sharp 
clear  light  of  definite,  practical  reality.  He  knows,  at  least 
intuitively,  of  the  puzzled  groping  between  the  two  realms  of 
mental  thought,  when  the  effort  is  made  to  bring  together  the 
conscious  and  distinct  and  the  unconscious  world  which  lies  not 
only  just  beneath  but  also  reaches  mysteriously  into  profound 
and  illusive  depths.  This  is  the  patient  task  of  those  to  whom 
dreams  are  of  definite  service  for  the  reordering  of  life,  and  to 
such  again  Barrie's  message  is  full  of  sympathetic  suggestion. 

A  dramatist  less  artistically  true  might  have  made  much 
greater  profit  out  of  their  dreams  for  all  the  characters  who 
had  gone  into  the  wood.  The  play  would  have  pointed  its 
moral,  the  dream  done  its  ideal  work  and  all  lived  happily  ever 
afterward.  The  truth  of  the  play  as  it  is  lies,  however,  in  its 
adherence  to  reality — with  all  its  startling  revelations  and  its 
phantasy.  The  best  in  the  real  world  comes  only  by  a  slow 
and  imperfectly  working  change.  Life  does  not  stand  still  for 
a  moment  and  the  self  revealing  dream  must  always  work  to 
some  slight  extent  at  least  its  "  little  leaven."  So  Barrie  per- 
mits it  to  do,  at  least  in  all  but  the  sordid  pair,  Lady  Caroline 
and  Matey,  the  butler.  Yet  even  in  them  who  can  say  there 
is  not  a  significant  flash  of  humbling  self  knowledge?  Lady 
Caroline  puzzles  over  to  herself :  "  And  I  seemed  to  like  it," 
though  she  in  self  defense  against  too  great  understanding  and 
self  acknowledgment  quickly  assumes  her  attitude  of  scornful 
haughtiness.  Matey  drops  less  conceitedly  back  to  the  familiar 
feel  of  the  coffee  tray,  though  his  fingers  slip  instinctively  to 
the  pocket  where  he  habitually  drops  his  tips. 

The  philanderers  are  the  first  to  come  out  of  the  wood  and 
stumble  back  into  waking.  They  find  themselves  in  the  dark 
in  the  room  that  is  strange  to  their  recent  experience.  Purdie's 
exaggerated  self  interest  and  pity  make  him  fear  he  has 
fallen  down  a  cellar  hole  in  the  dark.  As  they  flash  on  the 
light  they  discover  no  one  else  present  except  Lob  still  asleep 
by  his  chimney  side.  At  least  he  appears  to  be  oblivious  to 
their  existence,  so  soundly  asleep  that  all  their  efforts  to  be 
polite  to  this  apparent  owner  of  the  house  they  have  happened 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  143 

upon  fail  to  obtain  any  response.  Only  when  they  are  once 
more  absorbed  in  their  own  affairs  does  he  give  elfish  signs  of 
his  alert  watchfulness  over  the  success  of  the  dream  experiment. 
As  the  arrivals  come  drifting  in  the  "  trickster "  slumbers  on, 
profoundly  indifferent. 

Purdie's  perplexities  follow  him  into  the  waking  as  they  fol- 
lowed him  away  into  the  dream.  This  time  he  has  won  Mabel, 
so  much  the  dream  accomplished  for  him,  and  they  believe  they 
have  taken  refuge  in  this  strange  house  on  a  deliciously  clandes- 
tine expedition,  but  the  embodiment  of  the  third  factor  in  their 
uncertainty  presents  herself  at  once,  Joanna,  the  neglected  and 
spitefully  jealous  wife  of  the  dream.  Their  waking,  all  three 
together,  is  as  confused  and  perplexed  as  any  strange  inter- 
mingling of  the  wishes  of  the  unconscious  with  the  groping 
efforts  of  consciousness  to  establish  again  the  ordinary  relations 
with  reality.  For  here  at  first  as  so  often  the  wishes  from 
neither  side  have  a  decisive  influence.  There  is  on  the  part  of 
Purdie  at  least  that  weakness  of  character  which  means  the 
honest  yielding  to  neither  one  course  of  action  nor  the  other, 
through  the  selfishness  and  blinding  of  his  own  self  admiration. 
Joanna  falls  a  little  more  decidedly  out  of  the  race  as  soon  as 
she  is  wide  awake  and  Mabel  assumes  again  her  bright  quick 
attitude  as  the  real  mistress  of  the  situation.  She  is  more  that 
now  than  formerly  for  the  biting  stings  of  jealousy  are  softened 
through  the  humor  which  comes  with  an  appreciation  of  the 
real  state  of  the  case,  that  is,  of  her  husband's  proclivities,  and 
perhaps  her  own  readiness  to  walk  just  where  Joanna  did  be- 
fore. She  at  least  has  attained  a  somewhat  larger  view. 

All  are  enough  enlightened  to  admit  a  better  knowledge  of 
their  true  tendencies  and  the  hope  that  they  may  be  a  bit  better 
for  their  experience.  They  are  also  enough  ashamed  to  hide 
from  Mrs.  Coade  the  character  of  their  experiences  as  she 
comes  in,  candle  in  hand  and  rather  vexed  at  the  irregularities 
of  the  night  which  have  disturbed  her  complacent  rest.  Her 
equanimity  is  hardly  satisfactorily  restored  when  her  husband 
returns  still  in  a  merry,  playful  mood  and  unable  yet  to  remem- 
ber his  staid  married  state.  Only  he  has  enough  desire  for  her, 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 
144 

this  pretty,  comfortable  woman,  to  begin  making  love  to  her 
again,  stranger  to  him  that  she  is,  until  he  is  fully  awake  and 
appreciative  of  her  faithfulness.  Then  he  has  to  confess  the 
failure  of  his  dreams,  from  which  he  had  hoped  so  much  in 
proving  that  there  slumbered  within  himself  a  latent  energy  and 
strength.  And  all  he  could  boast  of  was  a  night  of  idle  but 
happy  amusement. 

When  all  these  have  found  themselves  once  more  in  the  or- 
dinary waking  world,  partly  ashamed,  wholly  glad  to  be  on 
ground  more  openly  familiar,  the  thoughts  of  all  turn  pityingly 
to  the  other  two  who  have  not  yet  returned.  Their  awaking, 
they  feel,  will  be  one  of  sorrow.  All  recognize  not  alone  the 
waste  in  the  lives  of  Mr.  Dearth  and  Mrs.  Dearth  but  the 
stronger  and  better  possibilities  which  these  lives  also  contained. 
And  then  Mrs.  Dearth  appears  through  the  curtained  entrance 
behind  which  lay  the  magic  wood.  The  bitterness  to  which  the 
fulfilment  of  her  dream  desires  have  brought  her  is  exaggerated 
as  she  brings  the  uncouth  manners  of  the  ragged  starving  woman 
into  the  lighted  room,  bright  again  with  reality.  The  rags  are 
no  longer  in  her  dress,  which  like  that  of  the  others  has  been 
transformed  on  leaving  the  wood  to  that  of  the  real  world.  So 
she  wears  again  the  blue  steel  trimmed  robe  of  domination.  But 
it  ill  fits  with  the  cowering  servility  of  her  manner  as  she  sees 
and  devours  the  food  upon  the  table,  ravenous  still  with  the 
vividly  dreamed  hunger  of  neglect,  symbolic  perhaps  the  dram- 
atist has  meant  of  the  empty  wife  and  mother's  heart.  While 
she  eats  and  tells  her  story  with  the  depravity  of  untruth  in 
the  form  of  the  perverted  truth,  how  she  gave  away  her  food  to 
the  hungry  artist  and  his  pretty  child  in  the  wood,  the  happy 
artist  comes  in.  All  present  are  now  truly  awakened  to  pity 
and  awed  to  silence.  They  face,  as  they  realize,  a  heart  rending 
tragedy  or — no,  not  one  of  them  conceives  of  hope,  only  doubt- 
less the  sprite  in  the  chimney  corner  who  apparently  slumbers 
on.  Even  he  has  come  to  the  crucial  point  of  the  test,  though 
he  yet  gives  no  sign.  Unless  perhaps  there  is  a  more  earnest 
quietness  in  his  form  instead  of  the  merry  contortions  which 
had  evinced  his  unobserved  interest  while  the  others  were  awak- 
ening. 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  145 

"  Yet  thou  canst  more  than  mock :   sometimes  my  tears 
At  midnight  break  through  bounden  lids — a  sign 
Thou  hast  a  heart. — " 

Dearth's  first  shock  of  the  reality,  which  the  dream  had  so 
joyously  and  hopefully  replaced,  comes  in  the  recognition  that 
he  has  exchanged  the  sensible  useful  brown  tweeds  of  the  wood, 
the  clothes  in  which  he  could  healthily  work  and  play,  for  the 
seedy,  soiled  and  spattered  clothes  of  the  life  into  which  he 
had  not  fitted,  which  bore  the  marks  of  his  dissipation  and  de- 
cline. He  comes  back  to  the  past  he  had  so  briefly  left  with 
a  quick  realization  and  a  poignancy  of  regret  and  sorrow.  Even 
here,  however,  is  the  same  redeeming  note  which  had  faintly 
sounded  before  and  which  had  marked  his  pity  and  kindness 
to  the  forlorn  woman  in  the  wood.  His  first  thought  is  one 
of  pity  for  her  who  must  suffer  through  him.  The  old  redemp- 
tion motive  of  love  saving  through  pity  is  at  work.  It  helps 
to  waken  the  wife  from  her  wretched  dream,  but  more  it  rouses 
her  after  the  revelation  of  her  dream  to  love  and  pity  also  for 
him.  Their  hearts  are  melted  together  with  grief,  but  are 
welded  also  in  a  new  hope.  They  can  no  longer  endure  the 
shallow  atmosphere  in  which  they  had  moved  with  the  others. 
Mrs.  Dearth  hastily  leaves  the  room  and  her  husband  is  not 
long  in  following  her,  for  her  love  at  last  finding  itself  had 
surrendered  its  pride  and  indifference  before  him. 

The  rest  are  now  quite  fully  awake  and  the  tenseness  of  the 
situation  is  relieved  by  the  outbreak  of  Purdie  into  a  bit  of  the 
very  real  world  of  trivialities  and  commonplaces,  and  the  whiff 
of  the  morning  of  another  day  of  life.  For  just  then  Matey 
solemnly  opens  the  door  of  the  breakfast  room  and  announces 
breakfast,  and  to  Mrs.  Coade,  "  I  have  given  your  eggs  six 
minutes,  ma'am,"  for  she  always,  as  might  be  expected,  takes 
them  hard  boiled.  Purdie's  resolution  to  profit  by  his  experiences 
has  already  failed  to  uphold  him  with  absolute  safety,  as  he  feared 
it  would,  for  on  the  way  to  breakfast  he  already  stops  to  whis- 
per, very  loudly,  in  Lady  Caroline's  ear  of  the  interesting  lone- 
liness of  his  soul.  But  Mabel's  understanding  being  quickened, 
she  is  both  patient  and  kindly  admonitory  to  this  weak  child 


J45  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

she  has  married,  and  she  reminds  him  of  his  waiting  breakfast, 
while  he  promptly  recovers  and  obeys.  Just  so  much  of  a  glim- 
mer of  regeneration  had  the  dream  wrought  for  him.  At  least 
he  knows  where  to  recognize  and  correct  what  he  can  of  his 
life  at  the  source  of  the  difficulty.  For  he  has  learned  to  say 
with  Shakespeare: 

The  fault,  dear  Brutus,  is  not  in  our  stars, 
But  in  ourselves,  that  we  are  underlings. 

This  is  the  text  of  the  play  which  Barrie  has  so  delicately  yet 
so  wisely  written.  Joanna  at  least  can  "  hold  on  to  breakfast " 
and  leads  the  way  into  the  breakfast  room.  Lady  Caroline  ap- 
pears unregenerate,  but  in  truth  the  added  superciliousness  with 
which  she  passes  her  dreamed  of  husband  on  the  way,  as  she 
follows  the  rest,  shows  that  something  is  touched  within,  even 
if  so  far  it  has  done  no  more  than  put  her  upon  the  defensive. 

This  often  lies  in  added  vexation  or  exaggeration  of  already 
over-compensating  qualities  for  dimly  recognized  weakness.  Just 
so  with  Matey  whose  chagrin  at  his  revealed  baseness,  which  lies 
deeper  than  he  had  suspected,  reacts  with  a  spitefulness  and 
vexation  toward  the  author  of  these  revelations,  whom  he  be- 
lieves he  has  at  last  in  his  power.  He  is  ready  to  wreak  a  petty 
revenge  upon  him,  as  human  realization  of  its  own  weakness 
is  prone  in  this  way  also  to  deceive  itself  by  such  an  exhibition 
of  futile  power.  The  rest  having  left  the  room,  he  turns  wrath- 
ful ly  toward  Lob's  corner  and  seizes  the  great  chair  in  which 
the  little  man  is  almost  hidden.  "  I've  got  you  now  where  you 
can't  escape  me."  He  shakes  the  chair  violently  in  gleeful  an- 
ticipation of  hustling  the  trickster  off  to  bed  or  under  lock  and 
key  or  wherever  he  thought  Lob  could  be  confined.  But  no, 
Matey,  you  little  understand  Lob  or  Life.  The  chair  is  empty  and 
no  trace  of  his  victim  is  to  be  seen.  Puzzled  and  balked  Matey 
soberly  lumbers  across  the  room  to  turn  off  the  lights  and  once 
more  draw  the  curtains  to  let  in  the  morning  sunshine.  The 
garden  is  not  altered  since  yesterday ;  the  mystic  wood  has  with- 
drawn as  it  came  and  the  flowers  bloom  brightly  and  philomel 
sings  merrily,  as  if  no  interruption  of  the  course  of  things  had 


THE  HEALING  FUNCTION  OF  THE  DREAM  147 

occurred.  And  there  in  the  sunshine  before  his  flowers,  head 
tilted  toward  the  morning  sky  and  listening  to  the  bird's  sweet 
song,  stands  Lob  unaltered  also  by  all  that  has  transpired  about 
him. 

He  is  not,  however,  unmindful,  no  more  than  through  those 
hours  of  seeming  slumber.  Lob  has  still  his  watchful  work  to 
perform  and  the  blessing  of  his  inspiration  to  give  to  those  who 
embark  on  the  active  stream  of  things.  He  has  not  to  wait 
long  before  there  is  sign  of  such  response  to  his  tenderly  and 
anxiously  devised  experiment  of  the  night,  over  which  he  is 
still  patiently  watching.  He  catches  a  glimpse  of  Mr.  Dearth 
and  Mrs.  Dearth,  for  whom  particularly  he  had  schemed  and 
hoped  and  he  joyously  hides  himself  while  they  pass  by.  Their 
transformation  has  been  an  actual  one.  It  has  lasted  over  into 
the  test  of  the  bright  day.  All  traces  of  the  dissipation,  waste 
and  failure  manifest  in  either  of  them  the  night  before  are 
gone,  whether  as  the  artist  had  worn  them  in  his  wretched  out- 
ward appearance  in  the  drawing  room,  or  as  Mrs.  Dearth  had 
revealed  them  hidden  in  the  sordid  wishes  of  her  inner  nature. 
That  which  was  good  and  of  real  worth  has  taken  possession 
of  them  both.  They  are  clothed  for  work  and  for  healthy  happi- 
ness in  the  open  air.  They  stop,  to  draw  in  deep  breaths  of 
the  scented  air,  to  rejoice  in  the  flowers,  birds  and  sunshine,  and 
then  fare  forth  happily  to  the  merrily  hummed  tune  with  which 
the  happy  artist  had  pervaded  the  wood  in  his  dream.  There 
is  no  need  for  them  to  "  hold  onto  "  the  trivial  things  with  which 
the  others  have  once  more  secured  their  place  in  the  real  waking 
world.  They  know  greater  more  lasting  realities. 

No  sooner  have  they  passed  on  than  Lob  springs  again  to 
view  before  his  flowers.  His  face  is  soft  with  loving  concern 
and  a  satisfaction  such  as  only  can  be  found  in  the  realization 
that  the  way  of  truth  has  been  opened,  that  one  has  assisted 
in  the  finding  of  the  lost  self  and  its  setting  forth  on  the  path 
of  sincere  endeavor.  Lob  knows  that  the  most  real  healing  has 
come  to  them,  not  through  other  circumstances,  but  through  the 
taking  of  another  turning,  finding  their  lost  powers  and  utilizing 
these  and  just  these  in  other  directions. 


148 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 


This  is  the  essence  and  art  of  mental  healing,  the  message 
which  every  true  artist  is  bound  to  preach.  The  others — perhaps 
they  have  learned  a  little  of  the  lesson  and  made  or  will  make 
some  few  efforts  in  this  direction.  Lob's  tenderness  has  not 
forgotten  them.  The  wave  of  the  hand  with  which  he  dis- 
misses them  is  a  lingering  one,  not  wholly  a  dismissal,  not  without 
affection  and  hope  there  too ;  but  he  returns  again  to  the  receding 
pair  where  hope  can  pour  itself  in  a  last  loving  farewell  of 
assured  expectation.  Then  his  happiness  bubbles  over  once 
more  into  playfulness.  He  tucks  himself  into  his  chair  with  the 
vase  of  petted  flowers  in  his  hand. 

The  tender,  wise  physician  may  rest.  His  patients  are  grop- 
ing toward  their  cure,  the  elixir  of  self  knowledge  working  in 
the  veins  of  their  minds,  dull  and  obscured  and  clouded  by  selfish 
egotism,  convention,  indolence  as  these  may  be.  Two  of  them 
have  shaken  themselves  free  of  these  and  are  already  well  on 
the  road  toward  perfect  health. 

"Yet  thou  canst  more  than  mock:  sometimes  my  tears 

At  midnight  break  through  bounden  lids — a  sign 

Thou  hast  a  heart :  and  oft  thy  little  leaven 

Of  dream-taught  wisdom  works  me  bettered  years. 

In  one  night  witch,  saint,  trickster,  fool  divine, 

I  think  thou'rt  Jester  at  the  Court  of  Heaven ! " 


CHAPTER    X 
"  THE  JEST  " :  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE  x 

Each  drama  has  a  particular  value  in  its  content  and  struc- 
ture as  a  whole.  The  author  conceives  a  certain  situation  or 
continuity  of  events  which  is  utilized  to  develop  the  psycho- 
logical thought  for  which  the  drama  internally  stands.  In  so 
doing  he  makes,  as  it  were,  a  cross  section  of  human  life  as 
he  throws  a  certain  grouping  of  factors  into  high  relief.  "  The 
Jest,"  coming  as  it  does  out  of  the  fifteenth  century,  represents 
a  section  through  the  development  of  human  civilization  at  a 
period  remote  enough  from  the  present  to  reveal  a  brusqueness 
of  manner,  a  frank  coarseness  of  language,  as  well  as  an  open- 
ness of  impulsive  action  according  to  the  freedom  of  individual 
desire,  whether  in  brutal  violence  or  in  more  refined  spiritual 
aims,  which  culture  does  not  so  directly  permit  today.  It  shows, 
therefore,  another  glimpse  into  the  unconscious,  a  portion  of 
the  development  of  the  race  which  has  been  more  or  less  cov- 
ered over  by  the  intervening  five  centuries  of  cultural  repression. 

There  is,  however,  a  still  more  profound  psychological  interest 
in  such  a  production.  The  drama  represents  a  grouping  of  the 
factors  at  work  setting  the  conflicts  at  all  times  in  human  lives, 
the  warring  elements  working  for  good  or  for  evil,  the  activity 
of  hate  opposed  to  that  of  love.  In  this  story  of  the  fifteenth 
century  the  destructiveness  of  hate  predominates,  but  this  makes 
"  The  Jest "  no  less  a  drama  of  truth  and  of  mental  and  moral 
stimulus  than  it  might  otherwise  be.  Health  lies,  as  has  been 
seen,  in  facing  life  as  it  exists,  and  that  more  deeply  than  is  seen 
in  a  mere  presentation  of  external  results  and  wielding  these 
perhaps  dramatically  according  to  desirable  ideals.  Mental 
strength  is  not  engendered  by  mere  idealizing  but  by  the  coura- 

1  Printed  in  the  New  York  Medical  Journal,  Oct.  4,  1919.  The  Jest. 
Translated  from  Sem  Benelli:  La  Cena  della  Beffe. 

149 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

J5° 

geous  facing  first  of  the  working  of  internal  forces,  watching 
them  even  as  they  lose  in  the  conflict  through  the  strength  of 
the  primeval  emotions.  These  latter  blind  individuals  to  the 
choice  of  a  reasonable  adjustment,  which  considers  social  re- 
lations and  mutual  adaptations.  They  drive  so  violently  along 
the  path  of  sheer  feeling  and  desire  that  even  reason  is  swept 
to  their  service  and  changed  to  the  cunning  which  aids  in  the 
precipitation  of  disastrous  ends. 

Love  has  as  many  definitions  as  the  phases  in  which  it  mani- 
fests itself  in  the  kaleidoscope  of  human  desires,  longing,  and 
pleasure.  Yet  it  may  be  comprehended  also  in  a  definition 
whose  simple  dynamic  force  contains  all  the  variety  with  which 
it  might  otherwise  be  defined.  Thus  practically  and  forcefully 
considered  love  is  union  in  feeling  and  action  for  constructive- 
ness  or  creativeness.  If  this  is  so  then  its  reverse  side,  hate, 
is  disunion,  the  same  force  in  all  its  might,  clashing  element 
against  element,  hindering  and  checking  all  productivity  and 
driving  to  destruction.  The  bitter  jest  of  life  this,  a  joke  that 
lies  not  only  in  the  keen  irony  of  the  plot  by  which  the  artist 
in  the  play  overcomes  the  fleshly  monster  of  cruelty  and  torment 
and  reaches  in  the  end  his  own  spiritual  destruction  as  well. 
It  is  the  cruel  jest  also  of  human  psychology  that  good  and 
evil  lie  so  close,  that  the  same  ppwer,  its  course  altered  over 
such  a  narrow  threshold,  flows  mightily  and  effectively  to  all 
creation,  upbuilding  on  the  one  hand,  rushing  to  pain  and  de- 
struction and  downfall  on  the  other. 

All  this  is  epitomized  in  the  woman  of  the  play.  She  is  the 
center  and  inspiration  of  either  course.  Trite  is  the  utterance 
of  this  fact  and  yet  it  will  always  be  repeated,  whether  in  the 
offensive  doting  brutality  of  a  Neri,  in  the  gentler  love  making 
of  the  sensitive  Giannetto,  or  in  the  more  eloquent  pathos  of 
the  humble  but  devoted  Lisabetta  who  visits  Neri  in  prison  and 
whose  truth  flies  straight  to  the  good  in  Neri  and  knows  none 
of  the  evil.  It  must  always  be  so  for  woman  must  represent 
in  herself  the  creative  source  and  stimulating  goal  for  creative 
desire.  Biologically  this  is  undeniable  and  spiritually  it  is  even 
more  broadly  and  immeasurably  true.  And  this  truth  is  figured 


"THE  JEST:"  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE      151 

in  all  nature  and  all  thought.  Literally  and  figuratively,  there- 
fore, love  is  summed  up  in  woman  and  the  conflict  surges  about 
her. 

Ginevra,  the  fishmonger's  daughter,  has  apparently  all  the 
natural  charm  which  makes  a  rich  feminine  appeal.  Giannetto, 
the  spiritual  youth,  has  dreamed  his  dreams  of  beauty  and  in- 
spiration, "  We  loved  each  other.  She  was  good  and  beautiful. 
I  painted  her  as  the  Madonna  in  my  '  Annunciation.'  We  were 
to  marry."  And  Ginevra  herself,  though  seduced  through 
money  and  power  to  the  lower  levels  of  her  nature,  where  she 
can  stoop  to  mock  those  sacred  hours,  reveals  still  in  her  mock- 
ery regret  for  the  holier  influence  she  exercised  in  those  days. 
"  Do  you  remember  a  poor  child  kneeling  in  a  cloister  garden  ? 
She  wears  a  long  blue  robe  and  holds  a  lily  stalk  in  her  two 
hands.  She  does  not  move.  She  kneels  and  dreams  and  listens 
and  the  hours  go  by.  .  .  ."  But  Giannetto  says  of  the  power 
of  those  days,  in  contrast  to  the  effect  of  the  hatred  which  has 
long  been  nurtured  by  his  enemies  and  then  deepened  fearfully 
when  they  stole  her  from  him  and  brought  her  to  the  present 
level :  "  Compare  the  '  Entombment '  I  am  working  at  with  my 
'  Last  Judgment '  done  two  years  ago.  Why  even  a  child  could 
note  the  falling-off.  My  heart  is  not  the  only  thing  that  died 
beneath  their  torments.  My  soul  died,  too." 

It  is  not,  alas,  merely  passive  loss  of  power  that  has  come 
to  the  artist  through  the  cruelty  of  these  enemies,  encouraged 
and  applauded  by  the  narrow  self  absorbed  exercise  of  suprem- 
acy on  the  part  of  the  woman.  Love  or  its  opposite  is  the 
representation  of  energic  force,  which  does  not  remain  quiescent. 
The  artist  is  driven  also  along  the  path  of  destruction.  "  But 
oh !  sir !  "  he  says  to  his  aged  friend,  "  I  have  one  thing  left — 
my  wits!  tempered  like  the  blade  of  a  fine  sword,  turned  by 
my  suffering  into  gleaming  steel!  And  these  wits  of  mine  set 
me  now  to  lure  my  enemies  with  flowers  and  feasting  and  with 
silver  flutes  to  their  eternal  ruin.  ...  I  was  so  good  until 
these  two  brothers  changed  me  to  a  devil." 

Giannetto  has  been  the  victim  of  brute  force,  malicious,  over- 
mastering in  its  lustful  sadistic  fleshliness,  since  his  boyhood. 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

At  twelve  years  of  age  he  was  compelled  to  submit  to  the  vile 
torments  of  his  enemies  as  they  imposed  upon  his  physical 
weakness  the  one  form  of  power  which  they  were  capable 
of  comprehending.  Their  treatment  exaggerated  this  weakness 
of  his  to  a  timid  cowardice,  overwhelming  the  greater  spiritual 
strength  and  nobility  which  they  could  only  taunt.  The  savage 
and  childish  baseness  of  superiority  based  upon  physical  strength 
and  lust  alone  is  cleverly  suggested  in  the  petty  forms  of  torment 
to  which  they  submitted  the  youth,  even  if  allowance  is  made 
for  the  ruder  humor  of  the  age  which  the  drama  represents. 
With  the  uncultured  barbarity  of  childhood  they  "  spat  on  me 
and  made  me  catch  twelve  big  blue  flies  and  eat  them  one  by 
one.  .  .  .  And  from  that  day  to  this  we  never  met  but 
they  fell  upon  me  with  their  fangs  and  claws." 

They  were  two  huge  brothers,  hired  soldiers  from  Pisa,  Neri 
and  Gabriello  Chiaramentesi.  At  last  they  add  to  their  coarser 
sports  this  crushing  evil.  They  seize  Ginevra  in  her  home  just 
before  the  banns  are  to  be  published  for  her  marriage  to  Gian- 
netto,  buy  her  from  her  father  for  fifty  ducats,  and  Neri,  claim- 
ing her,  seduces  her  soul  as  well  as  her  body.  Then,  at  the 
feast  with  which  the  play  opens,  he  returns  her  to  Giannetto's 
sight  only  to  mock  and  lacerate  him  with  the  revelation  of  the 
shallowness  and  corruption  of  her  nature. 

At  this  banquet  the  "  jest "  begins  its  work.  Giannetto's 
sharpened  wits  have  prepared  a  final  and  deep  revenge  after 
a  night  of  insult  more  deliberate,  more  elaborate,  than  any 
cruelty  yet  perpetrated,  aided  also  by  the  connivance  of  the 
faithless  Ginevra.  She  had  falsely  acquiesced  in  a  final  leave 
taking  tryst,  which  gave  occasion  for  the  seizure  of  the  artist. 
He  was  apprehended  by  the  powerful  buffoons,  stripped,  tat- 
tooed with  their  dagger  points,  with  which  derisive  devices  were 
pricked  upon  his  skin,  and  finally  thrown  fainting  into  the  black 
river  water.  Rescued  from  this  by  some  fishermen  he  has  ar- 
ranged, with  the  aid  of  the  great  Lorenzo,  a  feast  to  which 
his  enemies  are  invited.  The  two  brothers  appear  in  all  the 
glory  of  their  brute  strength,  filled  with  scorn  of  Lorenzo  the 
Magnificent  and  all  his  associates  and  with  their  contempt  of 


"THE  JEST:"  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE       153 

the  artist  in  no  wise  abated.  They  further  inflame  his  desire 
for  revenge  by  bringing  with  them  the  tempting  though  false 
and  mocking  Ginevra  to  goad  the  artist's  pain.  The  fact  that 
his  old  suffering  for  her  is  roused  to  a  keenness  and  sensitive- 
ness which  they  are  incapable  of  knowing  and  which  necessitates 
a  strong  control  and  suppression  on  the  part  of  Giannetto,  serves 
to  feed  the  flame  of  vengeance  more  hotly  and  to  give  to  it  a 
subtlety  and  an  abandon  which  at  first  even  his  own  sharpened 
wits  had  scarcely  conceived. 

There  is  but  little  in  this  drama  of  the  pure  glow  of  the  force 
of  love.  Here  and  there  are  remnants  of  it,  some  of  the  steady 
redeeming  power  which  has  not  yet  been  transformed  to  the 
devouring  flame  of  hate.  Giannetto  still  loves  Ginevra.  Her 
shallowness  and  treachery  have  not  destroyed  the  sincere  and 
holy  respect  with  which  his  early  desire  had  gone  out  to  her. 
Yet  lurid  passion  and  revenge  soon  darken  the  love  that  remains. 
He  loves  the  dwarf,  his  faithful  servant  and  the  physical  coun- 
terpart of  his  own  timidity  and  inner  consciousness  of  weak- 
ness. But  the  dwarf  becomes  only  his  reliance  to  support  and 
aid  him  in  his  design  for  revenge.  Neri  in  his  boisterous  way 
loves  his  brother  Gabriello  and  there  is  a  rough  attempt  at  fair- 
ness between  them  in  regard  to  the  girl,  but  the  hatred  of  Gian- 
netto stirs  up  the  unconscious  slumbering  jealousy  and  at  the 
last  tricks  Neri  into  destroying  his  brother,  as  it  first  tricks 
Gabriello  into  playing  the  traitor  to  his  brother's  possession  of 
the  girl. 

The  devilish  hate  engendered  in  this  once  gentle  artist  leads 
him  to  plot  a  jest  which  shall  be  one  indeed.  "  And  these  wits 
of  mine  set  me  to  lure  my  enemies  with  flowers  and  feasting 
and  with  silver  flutes  to  their  eternal  ruin."  Through  soft 
speech,  a  humble  mien,  compliance  with  their  noisy  insults,  he 
plies  Neri  with  wine  of  Cypress  "that  is  liquid  fire."  The 
brother  has  already  departed,  urged  away  from  the  city  by  the 
conflict  between  desire  for  the  girl  and  loyalty  to  Neri,  which 
the  artist  has  taken  care  to  rouse  into  his  consciousness.  Firing 
Neri  then  to  vindication  of  his  boasted  prowess  and  courage, 
the  artist  goads  him  forth  in  his  drunken  condition  to  a  more 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 
'  J^ 

than  foolhardy  attack  upon  the  adherents  of  Lorenzo  the  Mag- 
nificent. It  is  an  adventure  that  no  one  but  a  madman  would 
undertake  and  the  toils  are  laid  that  this  strong  soldier,  tem- 
porarily maddened  by  wine,  should  be  apprehended  and  treated 
as  a  veritable  dement,  all  protests  and  assertions  of  his  sanity 
being  of  no  avail.  As  they  increase  in  violence,  according  to 
the  nature  of  the  man  and  his  habit  of  violent  speech,  they 
mount  up  in  the  sum  of  appearances  which  are  against  him. 
This  is  the  jest.  Thus  is  he  in  the  power  of  the  feeble  artist. 

The  artist  meanwhile  has  secured  the  key  of  the  house  where 
Neri  has  earlier  sent  Ginevra  to  await  his  coming  and  his 
pleasure.  There  is  a  poisoned  sweetness  to  Giannetto's  revenge 
without  which  his  plans  would  be  incomplete  and  which  he  loses 
no  opportunity  to  bring  before  his  enemy's  notice  as  the  latter 
stands  bound  in  the  dungeon  where  they  have  confined  him.  It 
is  Giannetto  who  uses  the  key  and  gains  access  to  the  woman, 
but  even  here  revenge  must  reach  its  utmost  and  she  must  yield 
of  her  own  will  to  the  superiority  of  her  former  lover.  So  the 
vengeful  plot  is  slowly  protracted  and  Giannetto  is  ready  the 
next  day  to  confront  Neri  writhing  and  foaming  with  helpless 
rage,  lashed  to  the  underground  pillar.  In  a  still  deeper  dun- 
geon the  latter  is  also  submitted  to  all  the  horrors  of  a  medieval 
test  as  to  his  possession  by  the  demons  of  madness.  Most  gall- 
ing, however,  is  the  bland  mockery  of  Giannetto  as  he  cleverly 
disguises  from  all  around,  through  an  assumed  pity,  his  responsi- 
bility for  the  sufferings  of  Neri  and  his  actual  instigation  of 
them  all.  All  this  is  too  painfully  known  to  Neri  himself,  who 
must  be  goaded  also  by  the  consciousness  of  the  mockery  of 
Giannetto's  bearing,  the  helpless  realization  that  he  and  his 
enemy  know  between  them  the  trickery  and  fraud  of  the  whole 
proceeding,  which  so  excites  the  pity  of  the  onlookers.  Thus 
deeply  bites  the  jest  as  it  proceeds. 

Then  comes  the  sudden  news  that  the  brother  Gabriello  has 
returned  from  Pisa,  and  a  fearful  thought  takes  shape  in  Gian- 
netto's breast.  His  dwarf  first  utters  it  that  the  love  of  women 
"goads  ...  the  brother  to  commit  the  crime  of  Cain."  But 
a  better  moment,  albeit  mixed  with  fear,  first  comes  over  Gian- 


"THE  JEST:"  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE      155 

netto.  He  is  at  the  point  of  releasing  Neri.  Once  for  all  he 
offers  him  absolute  freedom,  to  cease  his  joke  if  Neri  will  give 
his  word  never  again  to  torment  and  torture  the  poor  young 
artist.  He  pleads  with  Neri,  "  There !  I  have  said  it,  Neri.  I 
have  stripped  my  soul.  You  see  me  as  I  really  am — in  all 
my  weakness  and  my  vanity.  Your  joke  had  lasted  for  so 
many  years  and  I  had  suffered  so,  was  it  strange  that  when 
the  moment  came  I  struck  at  you?  If  I  went  too  far,  remember 
that  I  am  not  used  to  triumph.  But  now — please  God!  the 
dreadful  game  is  ended.  Give  me  your  word  and  I  shall  set 
you  free.  .  .  .  Speak,  lest  both  of  us  be  lost."1 

Neri  however  is  obdurate.  The  suggestion  of  fear  and  of 
yielding  in  his  enemy,  who  had  been  so  long  his  helpless  prey, 
only  serves  to  rouse  afresh  the  contemptuous  triumph  with 
which  Neri  had  always  hitherto  approached  the  artist.  Half 
in  mockery,  half  in  the  role  of  the  doting  type  of  madman, 
which  by  this  time  he  has  assumed,  Neri  renews  his  derisive 
insults.  Giannetto's  terror  grows  not  of  the  loathsome  brute 
before  him,  but  of  the  hideous  plot  forming  in  his  own  breast, 
the  consummation  of  hate  which  is  bound  to  bring  destruction 
upon  destruction.  "  Oh,  Neri,  keep  me  from  this  mortal  sin ! 
I  am  so  young!  I  want  so  to  be  good — all  good  and  clean,  the 
way  I  used  to  be!  Oh,  I  would  rather  never  pray  again  than 
ask  forgiveness  for  such  wickedness!  Now  help  me,  Neri — no, 
you  must — you  shall — " 

Neri,  mockingly  deaf  to  the  last  to  Giannetto's  entreaties,  goes 
forth  freed,  unheeding  the  artist's  dark  threat  as  to  the  ven- 
geance which  will  be  awaiting  the  soldier  when  he  again  crosses 
his  own  threshold.  Giannetto,  alone  with  his  dwarf,  faces  now 
the  hot  breath  of  deepest  hate ;  "  Oh,  Fazio,  now  how  my  plans, 
my  pretty  plans,  how  they  wriggle  and  squirm  to  get  away, 
to  swish  along  the  floor,  to  coil  themselves  around  your  hot, 
brown  throat,  my  enemy.  Oh,  Fazio,  I  stand  at  the  edge  of 
a  pit — .  .  .  My  horror  of  it  grows  and  I  love  life  the  more. 
Fazio,  the  thread  I  have  spun  so  fine,  I  must  now  tie  into  a  knot 
of  death!  .  .  .  Fazio,  to-night,  to-night,  I  must  damn  my  own 
soul  to  hell!  .  .  .  Pray  for  me,  Fazio,  for  I  shall  never  pray 
again." 


156 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 


As  in  a  happier  drama  of  life  all  the  determining  forces  work 
toward  the  full  fruition  of  some  great  purpose,  so  here  do  the 
many  currents  of  hatred  which  have  been  roused  and  inflamed 
meet  to  a  blasting  destruction  which  includes  all  of  life.  Just 
as  body,  mind  and  the  sum  of  individualism  which  we  call  soul 
are  all  united*  in  the  love  which  informs  them  and  inspires  them 
to  the  fulness  of  creative  life,  so  here  body,  mind  and  soul 
burn  with  the  flame  which  can  only  blight  and  disintegrate 
in  utter  ruin.  In  the  woman  the  sacredness  of  love  has  been 
absorbed  into  the  gross  selfishness  and  the  seeking  of  advantages 
which  feed  merely  her  own  gratification  and  vanity.  There  is 
no  further  goal  in  her  thoughts  and  desires.  The  tenderness 
and  inspiration  which  the  "  painter  of  madonnas  "  had  succeeded 
in  partially  awakening  were  quickly  spoiled  by  the  allurements 
that  lay  in  the  trinkets  which  money  could  buy,  the  passing 
domination  exercised  over  the  brute  force  that  kept  her,  the 
fleeting  conquest  won  over  any  chance  lover  and  the  brief  pleas- 
ure seized  with  him. 

The  heartless  Ginevra,  whose  love  Giannetto  had  easily  won 
back  from  its  allegiance  to  Neri,  is  even  then  responding  to  a 
love  message  sent  her  through  her  tire  woman  and  is  awaiting 
the  song  of  the  new  lover  from  the  garden  when  Neri  once  more 
appears  in  her  room.  He  has  precipitated  the  final  execution 
of  Giannetto's  plan,  for  he  has  hastened  to  Ginevra's  house  to 
intercept  the  artist  when  he  shall  return  to  Ginevra.  It  is  then 
that  Neri,  in  his  own  ferocious  way,  puts  the  woman  to  the 
test  and  proves  the  utter  lack  of  true  love  within  her,  the  com- 
plete prostitution  to  her  own  advantage  and  welfare  of  all  that 
makes  her  woman's  nature.  There  is  with  her  no  thought  of 
the  sacrifice  or  the  service  of  love.  The  ordeal  to  be  sure  is 
a  severe  one,  but  no  glimmer  of  response  of  a  love  that  is  true 
is  manifested  toward  any  one  of  the  men. 

Neri  makes  known  his  scheme  of  revenge.  Ginevra  as  usual 
must  hang  the  small  alabaster  lamp  in  the  window  to  announce 
to  the  approaching  lover  that  all  is  well  and  then  upon  his  en- 
trance into  the  darkened  room  Neri  will  meet  him  with  death ; 
either  that  or  Ginevra  herself  must  forfeit  her  life.  Ginevra 


"THE  JEST:  "  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE      157 

can  only  begin  by  throwing  all  blame  on  the  absent  lover,  her 
one  thought  to  clear  and  save  herself.  "  Neri :  '  Well,  do  you 
throw  him  overboard  ?  '  Ginevra :  '  Yes !  Kill  him  if  you  must ! 
But  let  me  live — '  Neri,  contemptuously :  '  You  love  him,  then, 
as  much  as  you  loved  me.  What  a  rag  you  are ! ' ' 

For  just  such  an  act  of  attempted  vengeance  and  ultimate 
cruelty  on  the  part  of  Neri  was  Giannetto  prepared.  His  own 
plan  had  been  quickly  laid  with  the  knowledge  that  the  brother 
had  returned  from  Pisa  as  his  last  plea  to  Neri  failed.  As  soon 
as  Neri  was  released  Giannetto  had  hastened  to  Gabriello  and 
arranged  with  him  that  the  latter  should  visit  Ginevra,  disguised 
in  Giannetto's  own  white  cloak.  This  is  the  figure,  therefore, 
that  steals  into  Ginevra's  bedroom  under  the  watchful  eye  of 
Neri,  concealed  there  in  the  darkness.  He  has  first  compelled 
the  trembling  woman  to  enter,  that  the  deed  performed  in  her 
presence  shall  lose  none  of  its  horror. 

There  is  no  delay  in  the  hideous  succession  of  events  which 
mark  the  final  cataclysm  of  destruction.  Hate  rushes  unchecked 
to  its  several  ends.  The  brief  struggle  in  the  bedroom  is  suc- 
ceeded by  the  rushing  out  of  Ginevra,  wild,  disheveled,  the  em- 
bodiment of  the  ultimate  bitterness  and  death  of  a  love  that 
has  lost  its  nature  in  self  and  the  nothingness  to  which  such 
utter  prostitution  must  lead.  Neri  stands  at  the  threshold  for  a 
moment  triumphant  in  his  bloody  deed,  gloating  over  it  in  a 
savage  burst  of  hate,  only  to  be  confronted  by  the  slender  figure 
of  the  artist,  pale,  with  a  quiet  triumph  which  contrasts  with 
that  of  the  baser  brute  before  him  and  Neri  learns  the  horrid 
truth.  He  has  slain  his  brother,  the  one  being  toward  whom 
he  was  capable  of  any  real  love.  Because  this  is  so,  he  has 
slain  his  better  self,  the  self  that  saved  him  from  complete  ab- 
sorption in  hate  and  violence.  It  is  not  only  this  better  nature, 
it  is  also  in  fact  the  brother  he  has  slain,  the  warm,  brave,  living 
body,  not  the  materialistic  nature  alone,  but  the  body  as  instru- 
ment of  true  love  and  its  force  and  power  for  life.  Nothing 
is  left  for  Neri,  the  man  whose  life  was  summed  up  in  the 
forceful  use  or  abuse  of  that  body.  He  plunges  now  actually 
into  the  abyss  of  madness,  where  before  he  had  been  merely 


PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

the  plaything  of  the  artist  and  his  jest.  All  reason  is  gone. 
There  is  nothing  more  for  him  but  the  blindest  yielding  to 
every  foolish  and  ungoverned  whim,  except  as  he  shall  fall  into 
the  care  or  the  maltreatment,  the  humanity  or  the  inhumanity 
of  the  control  of  others,  in  whose  hands  he  is  now  forever 
powerless. 

This  is  more  than  even  Giannetto's  wildest  dreams  of  revenge 
had  planned.  "  Now  God  forgive  me!  He  is  mad!  Stark  mad !  " 
And  the  artist  falls  on  his  knees  and  tries  to  pray  for  his  enemy. 
But  what  prayer  is  of  avail  when  all  is  dead?  Self,  with  the 
power  of  love  in  its  hands,  had  sought  only  its  own.  It  had 
turned  away  from  the  pathway  in  which  love  lives  and  infuses  all 
that  it  finds  there  with  power.  Self  turned  back  upon  itself  and 
hate  arose.  All  the  force  of  self  but  went  to  feed  hate.  Power 
remained  on  every  hand  but  it  burned  destructively  and  its  end 
was  death.  Body,  mind,  and  soul  were  destroyed. 

"  The  Jest "  owes  its  importance  and  its  value  upon  the  stage 
in  part  to  its  skilful  representation  of  the  life  of  an  earlier  time, 
a  period  when  the  newly  awakening  intellectual  life  of  the  world 
flourished  in  an  era  of  political  power  and  of  beauty  and  pleas- 
ure. Its  language  is  that  of  an  earlier  century — as  its  setting. 
Its  lesson  of  dramatized  truth  is,  however,  changeless.  It  lies 
in  the  same  play  of  human  passions  which  exist  in  us  today 
and  which  sweep  on  with  the  same  inevitableness  to  destruction 
if  turned  into  the  pathways  of  hate.  This  may  not  be  so  easily 
recognized  in  the  present  in  the  ordinary  walks  of  life  for  five 
centuries  have  brought  much  restraint  and  much  external  emol- 
ument of  the  outward  expression  of  such  passions.  As  language 
has  become  more  softly  veiled,  so  also  has  a  certain  gentleness 
of  manner  and  of  self  control  come  to  pass  in  outward  behavior. 
Yet  the  passions  have  not  changed.  And  the  fact  that  they 
lie  more  deeply  beneath  the  covering  of  a  progressive  culture, 
though  this  serves  to  hold  them  to  a  certain  extent  in  whole- 
some restraint,  is  also  accountable  for  the  lamentable  degree  in 
which  society  has  lost  sight  of  the  force  for  which  they  stand. 

Energy  is  one  and  the  same.  There  is  no  difference  in  the 
inner  essence  of  a  brutal,  blustering  Neri  or  of  the  gentle  artist. 


"  THE  JEST:  "  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE       159 

whose  soul  burns  itself  into  a  holy  religious  zeal  in  his  painting, 
and  turns  to  the  deepest  poison  of  hate  in  the  end,  nor  yet 
of  the  shallow  and  faithless  Ginevra,  whose  power  of  love, 
devoted  only  to  her  selfish  gratification,  becomes  the  source  of 
strife  and  hurt.  All  are  containers  of  the  energy  which  moves 
on  to  one  goal  or  the  other,  to  love  and  more  life  or  to  hatred 
and  death.  Individual  personality  and  circumstances  have  de- 
termined for  them  different  forms  of  expression  or  it  may  be 
have  blocked  the  expression  of  such  life  force.  As  each  per- 
sonality has  thus  continued  its  way  or  altered  it  for  better  or 
for  worse,  success  or  disaster  has  been  the  result.  And  this 
is  the  sum  and  substance  of  human  life  today  as  well  as  then. 
No  one  is  a  blind  and  unwilling  victim  of  an  inherited  person- 
ality nor  of  circumstances  but,  as  with  these  dramatic  characters, 
choice  is  always  within  each  personality  to  be  exercised  every 
moment,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  for  the  use  of  the  dynamic 
force  of  life.  Therefore  attention  cannot  be  too  often  fixed  upon 
these  fundamental  facts  of  power  which  makes  up  the  moving 
passions  of  life  for  good  or  for  ill.  The  world  grows  sick  from 
lack  of  clear  knowledge  of  them  and  the  possibilities  in  their 
outpouring  to  create  and  construct  or  the  inevitable  results  when 
they  rush  unchecked  to  destroy. 

It  is  the  same  today  as  in  the  fifteenth  century.  Beneath  the 
restraints  which  serve,  now  as  aids  to  conduct,  now  as  hin- 
drances, the  same  forces  still  play,  divisions  of  the  one  great  force, 
which  is  the  movement  of  life.  In  some  it  moves  with  the  dom- 
ination of  overmastering  cruelty,  although  of  a  more  modern 
and  refined  type  than  in  the  mercenary  soldiers,  Neri  and  Gab- 
riello.  In  another  it  burns  with  the  steady  glow  of  success  and 
achievement  until  it  ic  diverted  by  disappointment,  injustice,  or 
cruelty  into  a  no  less  forceful  activity,  though  now  an  unpro- 
ductive one,  as  with  the  frail  artist  Giannetto.  With  another 
it  is  blocked  by  stupidity,  by  adverse  circumstances  which  have 
not  been  overcome,  perhaps  simply  by  never  having  found  its 
way  to  a  satisfactory  productiveness  in  spite  of  waiting  avenues 
of  interest,  to  which  the  race  is  sorely  blind.  Or  it  is  choked 
by  selfishness  as  that  of  Ginevra.  Even  the  many  lives  which 


J^Q  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

seem  undisturbed  by  such  expression  of  force  harbor  it  no  less, 
too  often  unaware  of  its  existence  themselves  and  still  more 
unaware  of  its  possibility. 

Yet  such  power  is  never  really  still.  Its  ways  of  exercise  may 
be  surreptitious,  roundabout,  disguised,  often  distorted  far  from 
their  original  source  in  the  deep  desires  and  passions  of  human 
lives.  The  unacknowledged,  or  even  unrecognized  activity  may 
be  manifest  in  symptoms  of  unhappiness  or  of  actual  neurotic 
suffering.  The  power  may  be  expressed  by  restlessness  and  dis- 
satisfaction. At  the  same  time  it  may  creep  forth  in  a  more 
active  but  still  unsatisfactory  form.  Love  seldom  or  never  has 
its  perfect  work.  The  poisons  of  hate,  flowing  in  many  di- 
rections, are  ever  at  hand.  They  are  not  necessarily  directed  to 
those  to  whom  one  might,  even  if  only  in  the  depths  of  the  un- 
conscious, call  one's  enemies.  As  with  the  artist  they  can  never 
be  active  without  involving  also  the  self. 

The  lesson  of  this  drama  written  in  heavy  lines  cannot  be 
overlooked  in  its  relation  to  this  diversion  of  the  force  of  life 
in  these  universally  prevalent  ways.  Yet  its  theme  is  also  more 
clearly  definite.  It  moves  in  the  more  fundamental  pathways 
in  which  man  and  woman  find  themselves,  in  which  they  meet. 
It  pictures  the  evil  that  may  be  wrought  by  a  self  seeking  that 
forgets  all  but  its  own  gratification,  its  own  selfish  establish- 
ment, to  which  it  also  prostitutes  itself.  It  is  this  which  creates 
the  offensive  brutality  of  a  Neri  and  the  brother  who  duplicates 
him.  Power  becomes  rampant  in  its  overweening  might.  With- 
out the  will  to  power  life  could  not  proceed  but  when  this  has 
no  vision  which  relates  it  to  one's  fellows  for  mutual  welfare 
but  serves  only  itself,  then  it  gives  no  place  on  the  earth 
to  one  whose  service  to  mankind  follows  some  other  pathway. 
Such  a  one,  if  weaker  in  the  physical  force  to  withstand,  be- 
comes only  the  despised  prey  of  the  power,  which,  inflamed  by 
its  own  boastfulness,  as  Neri  was  heated  with  the  hot  wine  of 
Cypress,  rushes  heedless  also  to  its  own  destruction.  The  love 
of  a  woman  is  only  its  own  unreasoning  gratification.  There 
is  no  social  purpose  in  such  power  nor  in  such  love,  nor  is  there 
any  true  self  realization,  only  blundering  self  glorification  and 


"THE  JEST:"  THE  DESTRUCTION  WROUGHT  BY  HATE       161 

in  the  end  failure.  As  in  Neri  and  Gabriello,  they  belong  to 
mercenaries,  moved  by  no  impulse  of  patriotism  or  other  higher 
motives,  but  soldiers  for  hire,  for  personal  gain. 

Giannetto's  will  to  power  also,  directed  at  first  happily  to  a 
high  and  noble  service,  when  it  becomes  embittered  by  long 
oppression  and  the  multiplication  of  wrong,  turns  upon  the 
losing  path  of  self  seeking.  His  goal  in  his  well  planned  jest 
is  not  the  actual  reestablishment  of  his  power,  such  a  true  as- 
sertion of  himself  that  even  his  enemies  shall  be  compelled  to 
give  him  place.  Even  if  such  a  desire  is  present  to  some  degree 
in  his  first  turning  to  revenge,  it  is  soon  stifled  in  the  poisoned 
satisfaction  of  outwitting  his  arch  enemy  and  stealing  back  from 
him  also  the  pleasures  of  which  he  has  been  robbed.  Though 
the  better  feeling  asserts  itself  once  more,  as  his  triumph  grows 
supreme,  and  urges  him  to  prevent  the  last  great  crime,  in  the 
end  he  but  proceeds  to  the  final  consummation  of  revenge  which 
destroys  all.  Satisfaction,  yes,  he  wins  that  in  large  measure 
if  complete  triumph  over  his  enemy  can  bring  it.  But  the  price 
is  a  costly  one.  Destruction  to  his  enemies  in  body  and  mind, 
while  he  has  dared  to  damn  his  own  soul.  If  his  painting  had 
fallen  off  earlier  because  hatred  and  desire  for  vengeance  had 
begun  their  work  in  his  mind,  what  can  be  expected  of  his  work 
henceforth  with  the  curse  of  accomplished  destruction  resting 
upon  him? 

The  power  which  Ginevra  exercises  is  of  a  subtler  sort  but 
it  lacks  the  dignity  even  of  a  well  directed  hate.  She  is  indeed 
a  bauble  for  the  last  bidder.  She  boasts  that  perhaps  she  was 
born  "  to  drive  with  reins  of  silk  two  roaring  lions  "  or  to  win 
the  poet  dreamer  to  herself.  Yet  she  knows  as  little  of  the 
satisfaction  that  comes  of  a  well  used  power  as  she  does  of  any 
real  contentment  from  the  trinkets  which  all  too  easily  win  her 
love.  '"Oh,  these.  I'm  tired  of  them  already.'  (Eagerly) 
'  There  is  a  pearl  necklace  on  the  Ponte  Vecchio.'  "  What  power 
her  unstained  purity  may  have  exercised  upon  Giannetto's  work 
yields  all  too  quickly  to  a  petulant  form  of  triumph  in  the  trifles 
with  which  her  favor  is  bought.  These  only  breed  fresh  dis- 
satisfaction and  stimulus  to  the  wish  which  craves'  merely  for 
itself  and  creates  nothing. 


l62  PSYCHOANALYSIS  AND  THE  DRAMA 

Love  inspired  through  the  true  nature  of  a  charming  woman, 
who  realizes  herself  in  a  self  forgetful  outpouring  of  its  strength, 
is  the  source  of  social  life.  This  fundamental  element  in  society, 
as  well  as  every  form  of  energy  striving,  or  pathway  of  the 
will  to  power  which  it  inspires,  belongs  to  a  mutual  social  adjust- 
ment and  mutual  recognition  of  each  individual's  right  and  par- 
ticular form  of  mastery  and  service.  This  mutual  adaptation 
forms  and  cements  and  continues  to  evolve  society.  It  requires 
some  sacrifice,  some  acknowledgment  of  the  weaker  by  the 
stronger  and  qf  the  stronger  by  the  weaker.  All  this  was 
lacking  in  the  catastrophe  to  body,  mind  and  soul  which  the 
drama  represents.  Wherever  also  they  failed  in  the  Florence 
of  the  fifteenth  century  the  destructive  work  of  hate  dis- 
turbed and  disrupted  and  hindered  the  harmonious  constructive 
work  of  that  newly  awakened  world.  Love  in  its  most  funda- 
mental sense  and  in  its  broadest  developments  has  its  way  to 
win  in  the  constructive  need  with  which  society  is  confronted 
today,  individually  and  collectively  in  the  world  tasks  newly  set. 
Nevertheless  hate  may  work  just  as  forcefully  but  destructively, 
hindering  and  destroying  in  the  divisions  caused  by  individual 
seeking  set  over  against  such  mutual  concession  and  adjustment. 
Self  seeking  prostitutes  as  it  seeks  only  its  own,  and  falsely 
thinks  to  content  itself  with  those  narrow  ends  which  belong 
to  such  seeking.  Union  of  feeling  and  action  is  lost  sight  of 
in  the  desperate  effort  to  establish  one's  self  or  hold  one's  lonely 
individual  place  against  the  might  with  which  one  dares  not 
unite.  Such  disunion,  whether  abroad  in  wider  social  events  or 
whether  serving  narrowly  to  cut  off  the  individual  life  to  its 
own  pleasures  and  bitter  pains,  ends  in  death.  Body,  mind  and 
soul  fail  of  their  great  social  birthright  of  life  and  are  dead. 


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